Glossary

Platform

• Workspace — the top-level account. Holds billing, members, and every project. See Structure.
• Project — a grouping of services inside a workspace, typically one per application or environment. Every workspace starts with a project named default.
• Service — anything you create inside a project: a Serverlet, a Proxy, a DNS zone, a Volume, or a Cron.
• Serverlet — Futrou’s compute unit. Runs a container image on CPU/RAM you choose, and can scale up, down, or to zero. See Serverlet.
• Instance — one running copy of a serverlet. A serverlet can run as multiple instances at once, scaled automatically.
• Plan — the CPU/RAM tier a serverlet is sized by, billed per minute. See Plans.
• Proxy — routes traffic from the internet to a serverlet or other backend, over HTTP, TCP, or UDP. See Proxy.
• Target — a destination a proxy forwards traffic to; a proxy with more than one target load-balances between them.
• Rule — a condition-and-action pair on a proxy that matches requests and redirects, rewrites, or modifies them without touching your application.
• DNS zone — the set of DNS records for one domain, hosted on Futrou’s nameservers. See DNS.
• Volume — persistent storage attached to a serverlet that survives restarts.
• Cron — a scheduled job that runs on a timer.
• Region — where a service physically runs. Public regions are operated by Futrou; private regions are your own servers joined to your workspace.
• Server — a single physical or virtual machine that makes up a region. Not to be confused with “serverlet.”
• Variable — an environment variable, set at the project level (applies to every serverlet) or the service level (applies to one serverlet, overriding a project-level variable with the same key).
• Activity — a logged entry in the audit trail of everything that happened in a workspace. See Activities.
• Member — a user with access to a workspace, holding one of five roles (Viewer, Developer, Billing Manager, Administrator, Owner). See Roles.
• API token — a credential for the Futrou API and Futrou CLI, owned by either a user or a workspace. See API Tokens.
• User-owned token — an API token tied to a person, short-lived and auto-rotated, acting with that user’s own access.
• Workspace-owned token — a long-lived API token tied to a workspace rather than a person, meant for CI and integrations.
• Join token — the token used to add your own server to a workspace as a private region.
• Credit — the prepaid balance a workspace draws from to pay for services. See Billing.
• Futrou Cloud — the managed dashboard, API, and account layer, acting as the control plane that configures and coordinates services. See Futrou Cloud.
• Futrou Nasua — the orchestrator that actually runs services in a region: starting containers, routing traffic, answering DNS. See Futrou Nasua.
• Futrou CLI — the terminal tool for managing Futrou Cloud or a standalone Futrou Nasua server. See Futrou CLI.
• Futrou MCP — an implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets AI coding agents work with a workspace through natural language. See Futrou MCP.

DNS record types

• A — maps a name to an IPv4 address.
• AAAA — maps a name to an IPv6 address.
• CNAME — aliases one name to another; can’t be used on a zone’s apex, only on subdomains.
• ALIAS — like CNAME, but usable on the zone apex.
• MX — mail servers for a domain, each with a priority (lower number = higher priority).
• TXT — arbitrary text, commonly used for domain verification, SPF, and DKIM.
• NS — delegates a name to other nameservers.
• SRV — locates services (host and port) for a name, with priority and weight.
• CAA — restricts which certificate authorities may issue TLS certificates for a domain.
• PTR — maps an address to a hostname (reverse DNS).
• SOA — zone metadata: primary nameserver, admin contact, serial number, and timing values. Created automatically and rarely edited by hand.
• SVCB / HTTPS — service binding records that advertise HTTP-related connection parameters (such as HTTP/3 support) directly in DNS.

See DNS for how these are used in a zone.

Proxy concepts

• Load balancing — distributing traffic across a proxy’s multiple targets.
• Round Robin — the default load-balancing strategy, spreading requests across targets over time.
• Primary Failover — a load-balancing strategy that sends all traffic to the first target, only using others if it fails.
• Layer 4 / Layer 7 — networking layers distinguishing raw TCP/UDP passthrough (L4) from HTTP-aware reverse proxying (L7).
• QUIC — the transport protocol underlying HTTP/3.

See Proxy for details on targets and rules.

Technical terms

• TTL (Time To Live) — how long a DNS resolver may cache a record before checking for an update.
• SNI (Server Name Indication) — the hostname a client sends during the TLS handshake, used to route HTTPS traffic to the right proxy without decrypting it first.
• HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 — the HTTP protocol versions Futrou’s HTTP proxies support; the client and server negotiate the best one automatically.
• OAuth2 — the standard authorization flow used to sign in to tools like Futrou CLI and Futrou MCP without typing a password into them directly.
• SSO (Single Sign-On) — signing in through an external identity provider (Google, Microsoft, GitHub, GitLab) instead of a Futrou password.
• MFA / 2FA (Multi-/Two-Factor Authentication) — a second verification step at login, beyond a password.
• Cold start — the delay before a scaled-to-zero serverlet can serve its first request, while an instance boots.
• Rolling update — replacing a serverlet’s running instances with new ones (after an image, plan, or variable change) without downtime.
• IaC (Infrastructure as Code) — declaring services in a config file (Futrou’s is futrou.json) instead of clicking through a dashboard.
• BIND zone file — the standard text format for DNS records, importable and exportable for a DNS zone.
• Bearer token — an API token sent in an HTTP Authorization header to authenticate a request.
• CI (Continuous Integration) — automatically building and testing code on every change, typically on every push.
• CD (Continuous Deployment/Delivery) — automatically deploying code once it passes CI, such as running futrou deploy on every push.
• WAF (Web Application Firewall) — a layer that inspects incoming HTTP traffic and blocks requests matching known attack patterns before they reach an application.
• DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) — an attack that floods a target with traffic from many sources at once to overwhelm it and disrupt service for legitimate users.
• LLM (Large Language Model) — a machine learning model trained on large amounts of text, used to power AI coding agents like the ones Futrou MCP connects to.
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) — software that performs tasks normally requiring human intelligence; in Futrou’s docs, usually refers to AI coding agents interacting with the platform through Futrou MCP or Futrou CLI.
• futrou.json — the declarative config file describing a project’s services, applied with futrou deploy via the Futrou CLI.
• Rate limit — a cap on how many requests can be made in a given time; the Futrou API caps at 100 requests per second, returning 429 Too Many Requests past that.
• Pagination — splitting a large list response across multiple pages, controlled with page and limit parameters.
• ccTLD / gTLD — country-code top-level domains (like .de, .io) versus generic top-level domains (like .com, .dev).