Accounts, clusters, pools

Cloud account

One Hetzner Cloud project, connected with its API token. The machines it holds are yours and Hetzner bills you for them. Rockslab reads the project's inventory and builds clusters there. See Connect a cloud account.

Cluster

A Kubernetes cluster that Rockslab built in one of your accounts, on Talos Linux. It has a control plane — one machine, or three for an etcd quorum that survives losing one — and one or more pools of workers.

A cluster can be:

• Always on — the default.
• On a schedule — down at night, up in the morning. See Schedule a cluster.
• For a while — deleted for good at a time you set. Good for experiments you would otherwise forget about.

Pool

A group of identical machines: one type, one location, a count. A cluster can have several — say, small machines for the everyday and a pool of big ones for the one hungry workload.

A pool can autoscale: Rockslab adds machines when pods have nowhere to run and lets an empty one go near the end of its paid hour (Hetzner bills every started hour). You set the ceiling; the autoscaler never passes it.

The platform

One cluster of the organization can be its platform: it carries the shared pieces every other cluster leans on — sign-in, secrets, metrics and logs, the Hetzner console. Other clusters join it. The platform cluster cannot be scheduled down; everything else depends on it being there.

Ids

Everything has an id with a prefix: o-… an organization, a-… an account, cl-… a cluster, run-… an operation. Quote the id when you write to support — it saves a round of “which one?”.