How we use terms
In any product, technical terms that have a generally-understood meaning in a wider context often refer more specifically to some particular thing or implementation of it in the product - Divio is no exception. This guide is intended to help make it clearer what we mean when we use certain terms.
Applications
A Divio application is a collection of orchestrated services, managed all together in one place in our Control Panel. In general, Divio billing is based on application subscriptions.
Cloudspaces
We provide multiple cloudspaces for application deployment. For example, if you deploy an application using our free Developer plan, it will use our North America public cloudspace, which runs on Amazon Web Services.
A Divio cloudspace is the infrastructure required to run our services, at a physical location somewhere in the world.
As well as having a physical location, each cloudspace uses resources belonging to a specific vendor or provider, which could be Amazon Web Services, MS Azure, another cloud provider, or even a customer's own resources.
Finally, for any physical cloudspace, we may have multiple logical cloudspaces. For example, we can provide a customer with a dedicated, isolated cloudspace of their own, that's based in the same physical cloudspace as one of our public cloudspaces.
Divio applications and their services can be migrated from one cloudspace to another.
Services
For each cloudspace, we provide various services - application runners, databases, media storage, and so on - that a complete web application requires in order to run.
Self-service applications on Divio use services on our public cloudspaces by default. However as well as entire dedicated cloudspaces, it's also possible to have individual dedicated services (for example, a database) according to needs.
Divio components
Control Panel
A web-based frontend for managing Divio applications.
Application builders
Our application builders build Docker images from an application's codebase.
Application controllers
A cloudspace's application controllers deploy and scale applications, launching containers from images that have been built and putting them into production.
Application runners
An application runner is a virtual server that hosts containers for one or more applications, and looks after them while they are running.
Ingress controllers
Our ingress controllers are sometimes referred to as load-balancers. They are close to the edge of our infrastructure, and hand off incoming traffic to applications' containers.