Atlas Docs

Glossary

Properties1
aliasesGlossary

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Terms you’ll see across the Atlas Cloud console, docs, and APIs. For a one-screen tour of the same concepts in plain English, see Primitives.

A

  • Account. A billing entity that owns resources (instances, networks, volumes, buckets) and is invoiced monthly. Users belong to accounts.
  • ACL. See Network ACL.
  • API key. The public half of the credential pair for the HTTP API. Paired with a Secret key. See Get API credentials.

B

  • Bucket. An S3-compatible object storage container at s3.runatlas.is.

C

  • CKS. Atlas Container Kubernetes Service — managed Kubernetes on Atlas Instances. See Deploy Kubernetes.
  • CSI. Container Storage Interface — the Kubernetes plugin that lets CKS pods claim Atlas block volumes as PersistentVolumeClaims.
  • Compute Offering. A VM size. Atlas offerings are Atlas.a4 through Atlas.a8w; see the console for the current list.
  • cmk. CloudMonkey, the command-line client for the Atlas HTTP API.

D

  • Domain. A hierarchical grouping of accounts. Users sign in with a domain path (e.g. /demo) plus username + password. Most customers only have the root domain.
  • Disk Offering. A data-disk size. Optional — root disks are sized by the Compute Offering.

F

  • Firewall rule. An ingress rule on a Public IP — which protocols and ports the IP accepts from which CIDRs.

G

  • Guest Network. A simple flat L2 network with NAT to the internet. The “home Wi-Fi” of Atlas. Compare with VPC.

I

  • Instance. A running virtual machine.
  • ISO. A bootable disk image, used as an alternative to a Template when launching an Instance.

K

  • Kennitala. The Icelandic national identification number, currently required for new account signups.
  • Key pair. See SSH key pair.

N

  • Network ACL. A stateless subnet-level firewall, applied to VPC tiers.

O

  • Object. A file stored in a Bucket.

P

  • Port-forward rule. A NAT rule mapping public_ip:public_port → vm:private_port.
  • Public IP. A routable IPv4 address. You allocate Public IPs, then bind them to VMs via firewall + port-forward rules.

R

  • Root volume. The primary disk containing the operating system of an Instance.

S

  • S3 access key. A separate credential pair used to sign requests against s3.runatlas.is. Different from the API key used for the HTTP API.
  • Secret key. The private half of the credential pair for the HTTP API. Treat like a password.
  • Site-to-site VPN. An IPsec tunnel between an Atlas network and your on-prem network.
  • Snapshot. A point-in-time copy of a Volume or Instance.
  • SSH key pair. A public key registered with Atlas; injected into VMs at boot so you can SSH in without a password.

T

  • Template. An operating-system image (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, etc.) used as the base for new Instances.
  • Tier. A subnet inside a VPC. Each tier has its own ACL.

U

  • User. A person authorized within an Account.
  • User data. A cloud-init script run at Instance first-boot. Useful for unattended setup.

V

  • Volume. A block storage disk.
  • VPC. A multi-tier routed network with subnet-level Network ACLs. Use when a Guest Network is too flat.
  • VPN. See Site-to-site VPN.

Z

  • Zone. A physical region. Atlas has one: is1 (Iceland). Every resource lives in is1.