App Platform Glossary
App Platform is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to publish code directly to DigitalOcean servers without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
This glossary defines the core concepts behind App Platform to help build your mental model of how App Platform work and understand what the documentation is referring to when it uses certain terminology.
The application specification, or app spec, is a YAML manifest that declaratively states everything about your App Platform app, including each resource and all of your app’s environment variables and configuration variables.
A buildpack is an open-source script that compiles apps as container images for a given programming language.
A content delivery network, also known as a content distribution network or CDN, is a geographically-distributed network of servers that deliver static content to users.
Connection pooling is a cache of database connections used for future requests to the database as required.
The console is an in-browser command-line terminal whose shell context is a running container instance for a given resource.
A container is a single running instance of a service, worker, or static site resource that you have shipped on App Platform, and is in essence a live, runtime instance of an image (the artifact produced by the build process).
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that permits loading resources on other origins, such as a domain, protocol, or port, via HTTP headers.
A central processing unit, also called a processor or CPU, is an essential piece of computer hardware that executes the instructions from a computer program.
Databases come in two forms in App Platform: dev databases, which are not intended for production use, and managed databases, which are instances of a DigitalOcean managed database that you have created outside of App Platform and would like to use in production.
doctl (pronounced “dock-tul”, and short for “DigitalOcean Control”) is the official command-line interface for the DigitalOcean API.
An environment variable is a in-memory key/value pair that developers use to store configuration details about their app.
Failover is a high availability (HA) mechanism that monitors servers for failures and reroutes traffic or operations to a redundant server when the primary server fails.
A gVisor container runtime sandbox is an environment of processes to run containers. Each sandbox has its own isolated instance of Sentry and Gofer.
A health check is a scheduled HTTP or TCP request that you can configure to run on a repeating basis to ensure that a service is healthy.
High Availability (HA) is an approach to infrastructure design focusing on reducing downtime and eliminating single points of failure.
The HTTP route for a service is the publicly-accessible directory path that maps to the root of your service.
A container image, Docker image, or image, is a static file containing executable code that cannot be changed.
In App Platform, a job is a type of resource that is running server-side code written in a supported programming language, such as Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js, or PHP, and is not internet-accessible.
A load balancer distributes traffic across a backend pool of servers to improve the stability and responsiveness of an application.
Logs are captures of the standard output stream that you can inspect for information about activity related to your app.
Master node, or cluster master, is a unified endpoint within a cluster which oversees activity on each node.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a type of cloud service that offers deployment platforms to build, deploy, and scale applications on a subscription basis.
Push-to-deploy support enables you to automatically deploy site live once code is pushed to the GitHub repository using GitHub Actions.
In App Platform, a service is a type of resource that is accessible via public or internal ports, and running server-side code written in a supported programming language, such as Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js, or PHP.
In App Platform, a static site is a type of resource that only consists of a build process that produces static assets.
Tags are keywords associated with resources which help with managing resource ownership and organize lookups and actions on resources.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a security protocol focused on privacy and data security for communication across the internet.
TXT records, or text records, define text information about sources outside of a domain. Common use cases for TXT records include creating email security records (DKIM and SPF records) and providing additional information about a domain.
Wildcard records are DNS records that direct requests for non-existent subdomains to a specified resource or IP address.