Core concepts
The vocabulary of Cloud Control: organizations, users and roles, cloud accounts, inventory and sync, the empty-to-real cutover, and the token design system.
This page defines the words used everywhere else in the documentation. Each concept has a dedicated guide; the one-line summaries here are enough to read the rest of the docs.
Organization
An organization is a tenant — a company or team and everything it owns inside Cloud Control: its users, cloud accounts, inventory, cost data and audit trail. The first person to register creates the organization and becomes its Owner. Data is strictly isolated between organizations; every API request is scoped to the caller's organization, and cross-organization identifiers return 404, never a leak. See Multi-tenancy & data isolation.
Users and roles
A user belongs to one organization and holds one role. Roles map to a fixed set of capabilities — read, mutate_infra, manage_cloud_accounts, manage_users_sso, manage_billing_transfer. The assignable roles are Viewer, Deployer, SRE · Cloud Admin and Org Admin; the Owner layers billing/transfer powers on top of Org Admin, and a platform admin (the operator of the whole deployment) can do everything. The complete matrix is in Roles & permissions.
Cloud account
A cloud account (also called a connection) is a link from your organization to one AWS account, GCP project, Azure subscription or Alibaba account. Cloud Control's access is always read-only and uses short-lived credentials — a cross-account IAM role for AWS, workload identity federation for GCP, an Entra app with a federated credential (no client secret) for Azure, and RAM AssumeRoleWithOIDC via a RAM OIDC provider (no AccessKeySecret) for Alibaba — never long-lived keys. Each connection has a health status: connecting, healthy, warning, error or disconnected (see the status vocabulary).
Inventory and sync
Inventory is the set of resources Cloud Control has discovered in your connected accounts. It is kept fresh by a sync engine that runs on a schedule, immediately after a connection turns healthy, and on demand — never by the browser calling a cloud API directly. Sync respects per-provider rate limits with token buckets, records how fresh each resource type is, and marks resources that disappear upstream as soft-deleted rather than erasing them. See Resource inventory & sync.
From empty to real
A newly registered organization has no connections, so every screen shows an honest empty state with a Connect a cloud account call-to-action — there is no demo or dummy data. The moment your first cloud connection reaches healthy, the organization cuts over: the console starts serving your real synced inventory, topology, dashboard and (once billing is ingested) cost. The cutover is sticky and per-section — a section with no real data yet stays empty rather than showing anything fake. See From empty to real.
The design & token system
Every colour, type size and status signal in the console — and in these docs — comes from a single semantic token system with hand-tuned light and dark themes, so status means the same thing everywhere and the whole UI themes for free. Status is never colour alone: it always pairs a colour with a glyph (● ok, ▲ warn, ■ crit, ◇ unknown) and text.