GETTING STARTED

Mental model

This page describes the platform vocabulary and object hierarchy. It is a prerequisite for the Quickstart and for the rest of the documentation.

Hierarchy

The platform is organized in six layers. Each upper layer contains the one below:

1
Tesserra
The platform.
analogous to a cloud provider
2
Zone
Geographic region.
analogous to a region
3
Nucleus
Cluster or server within a Zone.
analogous to an availability zone
4
Organization
Platform customer. Has plan, members, and quota.
analogous to an account / project
5
Project
Set of resources that make up an application.
analogous to a stack
6
Resource
Concrete instance of a catalog type.
analogous to services (compute, db, lb, etc.)

Every architecture is built from eight resource types. The Organization plan defines the total number of allowed resources and which advanced options are available (autoscaling, high availability, multi-zone).

Compute
Datastore
Archive
Fabric
Gateway
Autoscale
Sentinel
Insight

The Resource catalog page documents each type, its configuration fields, defaults, and examples.

Project lifecycle

  1. draft — resources can be added and configured. Nothing is provisioned or billed.
  2. planned — configuration is validated and the provisioning plan is computed.
  3. provisioned — resources are active. Applicable metrics and billing begin.
  4. paused — resources are suspended. Configuration is preserved for later reactivation.

Console modes

Simple

Shows only Compute, Datastore, Archive, and Gateway. Intended for cases without an explicit private network or advanced autoscaling rules. AI-assisted creation, when enabled, uses this mode.

Advanced

Exposes all eight catalog types and full controls: CIDR and subnets in Fabric, metric and threshold in Autoscale, Sentinel rules, retention and alerts in Insight.

The chosen mode affects only the interface. Provisioned resources, the API, and billing are identical.

AI layer

Each plan includes a monthly token quota used by platform AI agents (chat, suggestions, assisted generation). Usage above the quota is billed per thousand tokens according to the plan table. Details in Plan, tokens, and quota.

Documentation · Tesserra