Concepts

KibanOS organizes infrastructure around a few core concepts. Understanding them will help you plan and deploy services effectively.

Projects

A project is the top-level grouping in KibanOS. It represents a logical unit of work — your application, your company, or a specific product.

Everything you deploy belongs to a project. Services, databases, and tools are always scoped to the project they were created in.

Environments

Each project can have multiple environments. Common examples are development, staging, and production.

Environments are fully isolated from each other. A PostgreSQL instance in development does not share data or networking with the one in production. You can have different configurations, different resource limits, and different versions of the same service across environments.

Services

A service is an individual piece of infrastructure installed inside an environment. It can be a database, a cache, a monitoring tool, a CMS, or any other service from the catalog.

Services are installed with a single action. KibanOS handles the container, the network, the port assignment, and the reverse proxy configuration automatically.

Service catalog

KibanOS ships with a read-only catalog of over 100 services across 30 categories. The catalog defines how each service is configured, what ports it uses, and what environment variables it needs.

You never write Docker Compose files or configure Traefik labels. Everything is generated from the catalog entry and your project configuration. Adding a new service to KibanOS only requires adding a folder to the catalog — no code changes.

Isolation

KibanOS creates a separate Docker network for each environment. Services in different environments cannot communicate with each other unless you explicitly connect them.

This means you can run the same service stack in development and production on the same server without port conflicts or data leaks. Each environment operates as if it were on its own machine.

Routing

KibanOS manages HTTP routing through Traefik. Every service gets a local URL automatically:

{service}.{project}.localhost

You do not configure reverse proxies, SSL certificates for local use, or port mappings. KibanOS generates all routing configuration from the service catalog and the project structure.