Key Concepts

This page is the single glossary for the terms used throughout SVIEW and the
rest of this documentation. If a term in another article is unclear, it is
defined here.

Environment

An Environment is the top-level container in SVIEW. An Environment
corresponds to a Kubernetes cluster on a specific cloud provider (AWS or GCP)
and usually represents one stage of your deployment lifecycle.

Each Environment has its own health, compliance, and cost view on your SVIEW
dashboard.

Service

Within an Environment, a Service is a logical group of related Components
that you manage together — for example an application, its database, and its
storage bucket, grouped as one Service. The same Service usually exists once
per Environment.

Component

A Component is an individual resource inside a Service: a database, a
cache, a storage bucket, a message queue, a scheduled job, or an application
deployment. Components are where all configuration lives: each Component has
its own dashboard in SVIEW showing its configuration, secrets, and variables.
A database and the application that reads it are two Components in the same
Service.

Catalog

The Catalog is the menu of Component types available for you to provision,
organized by category (Databases, Streaming, Storage, and more) and by cloud
provider. Provisioning a new database or cache starts here.

Namespace

A Namespace is a Kubernetes-level grouping that your Components run in. It
is used for filtering and for cost allocation — for example, viewing spend
broken down by namespace.

Stage

Stage is the lifecycle position of an Environment: dev, staging,
production, or test. Most teams run at least a dev and a production
Environment.

Hierarchy at a glance

flowchart TD
    E["Environment<br/>dev / staging / production<br/>on AWS or GCP"]
    S["Service<br/>a logical group you manage together"]
    C["Component<br/>a database, cache, bucket, queue, or app"]
    E --> S --> C

Clicking into an Environment shows its Services. Clicking into a
Service shows its Components.

SVIEW — Overview — how to navigate the portal
What is PushOps — what the platform is and what it includes
What You Can Do vs. What We Manage — the responsibility boundary