Glossary

Adopted — a resource that existed in the infrastructure before zone9 was pointed at it. Visible and attributable, but not fully managed: the panel did not create it and does not know what it was meant to be.

Agent — the virtual machine inside a region that holds the hypervisor credentials and runs jobs. It connects outbound to the control plane. See Region agent.

Appliance — a locked virtual machine running platform software: a load balancer, a gateway, a storage node. No SSH, no shell, no accounts. Pulls its own configuration.

Applied version — the configuration version an appliance reports having actually loaded. Compared against the intent version to produce applying or applied.

Bootstrap token — a single-use credential delivered to a fresh appliance through hypervisor firmware metadata, exchanged once for a long-lived device identity.

Buffer — the grace period between a delete being requested and the resource actually being destroyed. Cancellable.

Control plane — the console, the API and the database. Decides, allocates and records; never holds hypervisor credentials in agent mode.

Device identity — an appliance’s long-lived credential. Stored as a hash in the control plane; the plaintext exists only on that machine.

Direct mode — a region where the control plane holds the Proxmox credentials itself. Contrast with agent mode.

Egress — outbound internet access from a private subnet, provided by a gateway. Absent by default.

EVPN — the SDN model where each private network gets its own VRF and each subnet a VXLAN segment. The alternative is VLAN mode.

Gateway — the appliance providing egress for selected subnets, and optionally Zero Trust access.

Intent — what you asked for, stored in the control plane. Contrast with truth.

Job — a unit of infrastructure work: idempotent, resumable, leased. Every mutating API call produces one.

Lease — the claim a worker holds on a job. Expires if the worker disappears, so another can reclaim it.

Listener — one routing rule on a load balancer: a port, an optional hostname, a protocol, a target.

Organisation — the ownership, billing and isolation boundary. Every resource belongs to exactly one.

Plan — a size: vCPU, memory and disk. Called paket in the interface.

Private network — an isolated layer-3 domain containing subnets. Two of them never route to each other.

Pull model — appliances fetch their configuration rather than receiving it. Nothing connects into your machines.

Region — one physical location: a Proxmox cluster, its storage and its edge. Regions share nothing.

Slice — a public address block carved out of a larger network upstream and routed to you. Every address in it is usable, unlike a subnet block.

Subnet tier — app, data or mgmt. Decides whether the subnet may have egress. data never may. Immutable after creation.

Talos — the immutable, API-driven Linux that managed Kubernetes nodes run. No shell, no SSH.

Truth — what actually exists in the infrastructure. The panel reads it and reconciles toward intent; it is never authoritative for it.

Zero Trust — reaching private addresses through an overlay network joined by the gateway, instead of publishing anything to the internet.