Concepts

Short definitions of the words you’ll see across the panel and these docs. Each links to the guide that puts it to work.

Node — one machine in your cluster. See What you need and Add your first node.

Master vs. worker — the two roles a node can have. The master is the one machine that runs the cluster’s control and the web panel itself; every other machine is a worker, added to it. A cluster always has exactly one master. See Install the master and Add your first node.

Pool — a disk you’ve prepared and handed over to the cluster, turned into usable capacity on the node it’s attached to. A pool is where storages are drawn from. See Prepare a disk and create a storage.

Storage — a size-limited slice of a pool that an app actually uses to keep its data. A storage is either node-local (kept on the one machine that holds its pool, the common choice for a database) or shared (reachable from any node over the cluster’s own network, so an app can use it no matter which machine it’s running on). See Run an app on a storage.

Package — the description of an app that the Store knows how to install: what it runs, what storage it needs, whether it can be published to the Internet.

Store — the catalog of packages you can install, combined from one or more sources you’ve added. See Run an app on a storage for installing one.

Install — a package that’s actually running in your cluster. Installing, upgrading and removing all act on an install. See Remove an app and its storage for taking one down.

Published service — something running in your cluster made reachable from the public Internet, under a name you choose, with a real, working security certificate. See Publish a service.

Tunnel — one of the two ways traffic can reach a published service: an outbound-only connection that needs no changes to your router, useful when your Internet connection can’t accept incoming connections directly. The alternative is forwarding ports on your router. See Get your connection ready.

Activity / task — a logged operation the panel ran — installing a package, updating a node, publishing a service — visible in the Activity panel and, for a single machine, on that node’s own Activity tab. See the panel tour’s Node detail section.