Core concepts

Fleetdock uses a small, consistent vocabulary. Understanding these terms makes the rest of the documentation — and the dashboard — easier to follow.

Manager

The Fleetdock Manager is the control plane. It serves the dashboard and API, runs the operations worker, and stores all fleet metadata in PostgreSQL. It orchestrates work but never opens a shell on a node — it enqueues operations for agents to execute.

Agent

The Fleetdock Agent is a lightweight Go service installed on each database node. It enrolls with a single-use registration token, authenticates with its own bearer token, heartbeats health every 30 seconds, and polls for operations to run locally. It exists so the Manager can act on a node without holding SSH access to it.

Node (server)

A node is a host running the agent. Fleetdock tracks each node's status, OS, memory, disk, Docker availability, and database engine version. A node with no heartbeat for two minutes is flipped to offline.

Instance

An instance is a database server process. There are two kinds:

• Managed — runs on one of your nodes; operations are executed by that node's agent against 127.0.0.1. A managed instance is either provisioned by Fleetdock (a database Docker container it launches — MariaDB, MySQL, or PostgreSQL) or registered (pointing at a database already running on the node).
• External — a reachable database you already host elsewhere; the control plane connects to it directly.

Database

A database is a logical database on an instance. When the instance has admin credentials, creating a database physically creates it via an operation; otherwise it is a metadata-only registration. Databases can be locked, unlocked, and soft-deleted with a seven-day recovery window.

Database engine

The engine identifies the database technology. Fleetdock supports MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL today for provisioning, administration, backups, restores, and migration, through a pluggable engine layer that more engines can be added to later.

Operation

An operation is any asynchronous action — create or drop a database, backup, restore, import, or connection test — tracked as a job with status, progress, and errors. Managed -instance jobs are claimed by the node's agent; external-instance jobs run on the Manager's built-in worker. Every operation is visible on the Operations page.

Backup and destination

A backup is a point-in-time dump of a database (mariadb-dump, gzipped, checksummed). A destination is the S3, Cloudflare R2, or S3-compatible bucket a backup is streamed to. Storage keys — and instance passwords — are envelope-encrypted at rest.

Restore

A restore writes a backup's contents into a target database. Restores verify the backup artifact's checksum before touching the target and report the restored table count.

Migration (move)

A migration relocates or copies a database to another instance or server. It runs as a saga: backup → restore → verify → optionally drop the source. Leaving the source in place makes it a copy; dropping it makes it a true move.

Credential

A credential is a database username and password (and its grants). Fleetdock can create, view, and drop database users and grants for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Instance admin credentials are stored encrypted.

Endpoint

An endpoint describes how to reach a database. Every database has a private endpoint on its instance (server.address:port). When public access is enabled, it also has a public endpoint through the Fleetdock Gateway (gateway-host:assigned-port). The public endpoint stays stable across migrations; the gateway routes to the current private backend.

Application credential

An application credential is a scoped database user created for external applications — separate from instance root credentials. Passwords are encrypted at rest; connection URLs are shown once on create or rotate. Permission profiles (readonly, readwrite, admin) limit grants to the database scope.

Storage and capacity

Storage refers to the data volumes backing instances and the object storage holding backups. Capacity is the CPU, memory, and disk headroom on each node, reported by heartbeats and charted over time.

Health status

Health status reflects whether a node is online and whether an instance and its databases are reachable and responsive. Node status and instance health drive the overview dashboard and alerting.

How they relate

Manager ──enqueues──▶ Operation ──claimed by──▶ Agent ──runs on──▶ Node
                                                                   └─ Instance ─ Database
Backup ──streamed to──▶ Destination (S3 / R2)
Migration = Backup ▶ Restore ▶ Verify ▶ (optional) Drop source