Core concepts

Account

Your identity (a Clerk user) plus a credit balance. New accounts are granted $10 of trial credit automatically on first API call. See Credits & billing.

Instance

A hosting panel registered by an admin. Cloud API can manage many instances at once; each has an Application API key (for provisioning) and, optionally, a Client API key (for power, console and files). Instances have a priority — lower numbers are preferred when placing new servers.

Egg

A deployable template on a panel — Minecraft Paper, Rust, PostgreSQL, a Discord bot, and so on. Eggs are namespaced by instance: a deploy targets a specific (instanceId, eggId) pair. See Eggs.

Region & stock

Nodes are tagged with a region (e.g. USA, SPAIN). The stock engine aggregates free memory, disk, CPU and allocations across every node of every instance and picks the best placement. See Regions & stock.

Server

A running workload. Cloud API stores its ownership, resources and hourly price, and proxies power, console and file operations to the underlying panel. Deleting a server tears it down on the panel and stops billing.

Transaction

An immutable ledger entry: trial grants, admin grants, top-ups and hourly charges. Your balance is the sum of the ledger.