Concepts

SKE organizes resources in a hierarchy. Understanding this hierarchy is essential for managing projects, permissions, and infrastructure.

Resource hierarchy

Organization (billing root, team membership)
└── Workspace (isolation boundary for projects and infrastructure)
    ├── Cloud Provider (AWS account or GCP project credentials)
    ├── Network (VPC / subnet configuration)
    │   ├── Database (RDS or Cloud SQL instance)
    │   └── Cache (ElastiCache or Memorystore instance)
    ├── Project (your application)
    │   └── Environment (production, staging, etc.)
    │       ├── Custom domain (your own hostname for the environment)
    │       └── Deployment (a released version of your code)

Organization

An organization is the top-level billing and membership boundary. Every user has a personal organization created at signup. You can create additional organizations for companies or teams.

Organizations own billing, members, teams, and roles. All resources ultimately belong to an organization.

Switch between organizations:

ske orgs

SLUG         NAME              PERSONAL
* acme-corp  Acme Corporation  no
jane-doe     Jane Doe          yes

ske orgs switch acme-corp

Workspace

A workspace groups related projects and infrastructure within an organization. Every organization has a default workspace created automatically.

Workspaces provide isolation — cloud providers, networks, databases, and caches are scoped to a workspace. A common pattern is one workspace per client or product line.

ske workspace list

NAME        SLUG        DEFAULT  CREATED
Production  production  yes      2026-08-15T10:02:11.000000Z
Staging     staging     no       2026-08-20T08:41:57.000000Z

ske workspace switch production

Cloud Provider

A cloud provider connects an external AWS account or GCP project to your workspace. SKE uses the provided credentials to provision and manage infrastructure inside that account.

Each workspace can have multiple cloud providers. An environment references a specific provider for deployment.

See Cloud Providers for setup instructions.

Project

A project represents a single application. It has a name, a runtime (e.g., laravel), and one or more environments.

Projects live in a workspace and are identified by a slug. ske link links a local directory to a project and a default environment.

Environment

An environment is a deployment target within a project — typically production, staging, or development. Each environment has its own:

• Cloud provider and region
• Container image version
• Secrets and environment variables
• Database, cache, and network configuration
• Custom domains
• Deployment history

Environments are isolated from each other. A deployment to staging does not affect production.

Deployment

A deployment is a specific release of your code to an environment. Each deployment produces an immutable container image stored in your cloud provider’s registry.

Deployments have a status lifecycle:

Status	Meaning
pending	Deployment created, waiting to start
building	Container image being built and pushed
deploying	Infrastructure being provisioned or updated
succeeded	Live and serving traffic
failed	Something went wrong (check deployment output)
cancelled	Cancelled before completion

Deployment types:

Type	Meaning
deploy	A new code release
rollback	Reactivating a previous deployment’s image
env_sync	Applying configuration changes without new code
maintenance	Toggling maintenance mode

Infrastructure Operation

Infrastructure operations are asynchronous jobs for provisioning or modifying cloud resources — creating a database, setting up a VPC, or issuing an SSL certificate. They run in the background and report progress through the API.

ske job list

ID                   TYPE             STATUS     CREATED
7246182409966278657  cache:create     running    2026-09-20T14:35:02.000000Z
7246181998310522881  database:create  succeeded  2026-09-20T14:30:41.000000Z
7246181523785342977  network:create   succeeded  2026-09-20T14:28:09.000000Z

All infrastructure operations are non-blocking. SKE submits the operation and polls for completion with exponential backoff, so the CLI returns immediately while the work happens in your cloud account.

Linked directory

ske link saves the project and default environment for a directory in .ske/project.json, kept out of git:

ske link --project my-laravel-app --env production

The CLI uses it to decide which project and environment to target when you run commands like ske deploy. --project and --env, or SKE_PROJECT and SKE_ENV, override it. The environment’s settings themselves are kept in SKE and changed in the dashboard.