Environments and projects

Environments

A hub manages servers of three kinds, each running an environment (your YAML from Git, run by Podman):

• production: what your users reach;
• staging: a server that gets releases before production;
• twin: a short-lived copy of a production or staging environment for one task. See twins.

Projects today Built

A hub knows two cloud projects, as two fixed settings:

• the hub’s own project: the hub, production and staging, on one private network;
• the twins’ project: twins, recovery tests and, later, agent servers.

The production token never reaches a twin. A Hetzner Cloud token covers its whole project, so a separate twins project limits what a leaked twin token reaches.

Why projects matter on Hetzner

fact	consequence
a token covers its whole project, read and write	more projects limit what a leaked app or cluster token reaches
a private network belongs to one project	servers in different projects talk over public addresses
Cloud Firewalls do not filter traffic inside a private network (Hetzner’s firewall FAQ)	everything on a private network can reach everything else on it
quotas are per project	a busy twins project cannot eat production’s quota
projects cost nothing and show separately on the invoice	separation by project is free

The firewall row is the subject of a blog post.

Projects as objects Planned

Decided in part on 23 October 2026, the rest proposed: a project becomes an object in the hub with a token, a purpose and its networks, and a hub holds as many as it needs.

• Five purposes: management (the hub), production, nonproduction (staging and the like), twins, and sandbox (agent servers), later a sixth, infrastructure.
• Two hard rules: a token of a production, management or nonproduction project never enters a twin or a sandbox; nothing of purpose twins or sandbox joins a private network that production uses. The hub refuses a binding that breaks them.
• Agent sandboxes join no private network at all. An agent server reaches its own twin only through the hub.
• Layouts: small (two projects, as today, what vai up makes), business (one project per purpose, for teams with an auditor), agency (per client).

It is scheduled after the CLI over HTTPS.