Getting started

From an account to something running on the internet.

This is the short path. Every step has a page of its own if you want the detail.

1. Sign up

Open isogrid.skyvault.pro and either create an account with your email address and a password, or choose Continue with Google.

  • With Google, there is no password to choose and no confirmation email: Google has already confirmed your address. If an ISOGrid account with the same address exists, you are asked for its password once and the two are linked; afterwards either way signs you in.
  • With a password, confirm your address from the email you receive.

Two-step verification is optional but strongly recommended: with it, signing in also asks for a 6-digit code from an authenticator app on your phone (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator or FreeOTP), so a stolen password alone is not enough. Until you set it up, the console reminds you at the top of the page; Set it up takes you straight there, and so does Profile → Two-step verification. Signing in with Google does not replace it.

The command-line tool signs in through the same page, so a Google account works there too.

2. Create an organization

Signing up creates your account and your first organization. The organization is what owns everything and what gets billed, so give it the name of your company or your project rather than your own — it is visible to everyone you invite, and renaming it later is easy but re-explaining it is not.

3. Add credit

Nothing that costs money can be created against an empty balance. You can look around, connect a repository and configure an application without paying; the moment you ask for something that runs, the platform checks you can pay for it.

The estimate shown before you confirm is what it will cost per month at the size you chose, in your billing currency. It is an estimate because you may scale, stop, or be billed for less than a full month.

4. Deploy something

Connect a code repository, pick it, choose a region and a size, and deploy. The platform detects how to build it and asks if anything is ambiguous.

If you would rather see the machinery work before wiring up your own code, deploy any small web application you have. The first deployment is the one worth doing on something you do not mind breaking.

5. Visit the address

Every application gets an address as soon as it is running, over an encrypted connection, with a certificate obtained and renewed by the platform. You do not have to own a domain to have something working on the internet.

When you are ready to use your own name, see Addresses and domains.

6. Add the things it talks to

Most applications need somewhere to keep data. Order it separately from the application — a database outlives the hundred deployments you will make against it — and connect them with environment values.

What to do on day two

Add a second copy of anything customers use. One copy means a gap in service every time you deploy and every time a machine underneath is replaced.

Turn on backups. Copies of your data across machines survive a machine failing. They do not survive a mistaken deletion, which is copied everywhere just as faithfully. This is the single most common way teams lose data on any platform, including this one.

Invite your colleagues with the right role, rather than sharing one login. Roles are what stop an accident becoming an incident, and shared logins make the history of who did what useless. See Roles, permission groups and access for giving someone exactly what they need and no more.

Look at the logs once while everything is working. Knowing what healthy looks like is what makes an unhealthy one obvious later.