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.) |
Resource catalog
Every architecture is built from eleven catalog resource types. The Organization plan defines the total number of allowed resources and which advanced options are available (autoscaling, high availability, multi-zone).
The Resource catalog page documents each type, its configuration fields, defaults, and examples.
Project lifecycle
- draft — resources can be added and configured. Nothing is provisioned or billed.
- planned — configuration is validated and the provisioning plan is computed.
- provisioned — resources are active. Applicable metrics and billing begin.
- 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 eleven catalog types and full controls: CIDR and subnets in Fabric, metric and threshold in Autoscale, Sentinel rules, retention and alerts in Insight, plus Conduit, Lane, and Beacon.
The chosen mode affects only the interface. Provisioned resources, the API, and billing are identical.
AI Architect and token quota
The AI Architect (App → AI Architect menu and Project AI Architect tab) suggests blueprints, adds catalog resources, and can provision them. Each plan includes a monthly token quota for platform AI agents (chat, suggestions, assisted generation). Usage above the quota is billed per thousand tokens — see Plan, tokens, and quota.
Product ecosystem
Compute → Linux instance / web, API, and worker workloads Datastore → managed database Archive → object storage and volumes Fabric → private project network Gateway → public edge and TLS Autoscale → replica scaling Sentinel → firewall and WAF Insight → observability Conduit → streaming and messaging Lane → queues and jobs Beacon → events and notifications