Getting started
1. Account and plan
Sign up with email and password (GitHub and Google sign-in work too), and acknowledge the data-processing and Terms documents — they state plainly that infrastructure changes apply and destroy automatically once you confirm. Projects and components need an active plan; First access starts at $1 a month and is the plan meant for the early-access period.
2. Create a project
A project targets one provider. Pick the provider when you create it:
- Machines (Incus) — the platform creates VMs or containers on an Incus server or cluster you connect, and configures them with Ansible.
- Kubernetes — the platform releases Helm charts into a cluster you connect, namespace-scoped.
- AWS — the platform creates EC2 machines and EBS volumes in your account through GitLab↔AWS identity federation; no long-lived keys travel.
- OpenStack — the platform creates Nova machines, Neutron networks and Cinder volumes in a Keystone project of your cloud, authenticated by an application credential you mint and can revoke at any time.
3. Register a runner
Every deploy and destroy runs as a pipeline on a GitLab runner you bring — registered from your own machine, or created through the platform's managed runner flow on your targets. Nothing deploys until a runner with your project's tag is online. See Runners.
4. Settings before the first deploy
For machine projects: choose the OS image, instance type (VM or container), CPU, memory and disk in the project's VM settings; open the component's app settings once and save them (that validation is a deliberate gate); attach a storage volume for every component that declares a persistent path.
5. Deploy
The deploy button renders the contract, asks for a typed confirmation, then
submits the pipeline and follows it. Component health on the project pages
reflects what the target reports afterwards — a machine says running · configured, a chart reports its release status.
6. Destroy
Destroys are first-class: the same pipeline path in reverse, with a cascade that removes everything the platform created for the project — and a sweeper finishes abandoned destroys even if you close the tab.