Core concepts
A quick tour of the ideas you will meet across the dashboard. You do not need to read this end to end before getting started, but it helps to know how the pieces fit together.
Organization
Section titled “Organization”Your organization is your workspace on h8lio. It has a display name (for
example “ACME Corp”) and a short, immutable identifier used in URLs, cluster
names, and subdomains (for example acme).
Everything lives inside an organization: members, applications, clusters, and a single subscription. One organization maps to one subscription.
Members and roles
Section titled “Members and roles”People you invite to your organization are its members. Each member holds one role that decides what they can do:
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full access, and the only role that manages the subscription. |
| Admin | Full access, including managing members and integrations. |
| Developer | Build and ship in Factory; read-only on Cloud. |
| Operator | Run and operate in Cloud; read-only on Factory. |
See Team management to invite members and assign roles.
The four pillars
Section titled “The four pillars”The dashboard is organized into four pillars, shown in the sidebar.
- Solutions — your business applications, seen end to end. A solution is the whole thing: its components, its environments, and how it is deployed.
- Factory — where you build and ship. Your code repositories, mirrors, registries, and the CI pipelines that turn your sources into container images.
- Cloud — where your workloads run. Your Kubernetes clusters and the resources around them: networking, storage, backups, and monitoring.
- Catalog — ready-to-deploy applications you can install into your clusters.
Solutions, services, and clusters
Section titled “Solutions, services, and clusters”These three terms come up constantly, so it is worth pinning them down.
- A Service is a single source of code or container images: a Git repository, a mirror of an external source, or a registry. Services live in Factory.
- A Cluster is the Kubernetes environment your workloads run in. By default you get a shared namespace; dedicated options are available. Clusters live in Cloud.
- A Solution ties it together: it is a business application made of one or more services, deployed across one or more environments, with its GitOps wiring and backups. Solutions are the highest-level view of “your app”.
A useful way to read it: Factory builds your services, Cloud runs them, and a Solution is the application they add up to.
GitOps
Section titled “GitOps”h8lio deploys your applications with GitOps. The desired state of a deployment lives in a Git repository, and the platform continuously reconciles your clusters to match it.
In practice, you change what runs either through the dashboard (which writes the change to Git for you) or by committing to Git directly. The platform then syncs your cluster to the new state and shows you, per service and per environment, whether everything is in sync. The payoff: a versioned, auditable history of every deployment, and a straightforward rollback.
Billing
Section titled “Billing”h8lio billing is usage-based: a monthly platform subscription that includes a generous allowance, plus metered consumption (CPU, memory, storage, and more) above that allowance, charged in euros. New organizations start with a free trial, and no payment is taken until you actively subscribe.
The Owner follows costs, sets a budget alert, and manages invoices and payment from the Subscription page.