Glossary

App

Apps in Tempest are our first-party integrations with your third-party providers. They allow you to connect all of your favorite tooling into our platform and also powers part of Tempest Orchestration. Through Tempest apps, you can import your data to hydrate the Catalog and gain visibility into your service health, automate Project creation and orchestration.

Catalog

The catalog shows available, published recipes, created by your platform admin. Developers can view the catalog under “Projects” and use available recipes to configure and create a new project.

Dedicated environment

Dedicated environments are the most stable type of environments and should be used for long lived content such as sandbox, QA, or production.

Environment

Environments are siloed instances of groups of recipe resources (including any resources under global setup). Variables, credentials, and resources cannot be shared between environments. Any resources configured under an environment will provision only for that environment, such as DNS record sets. A recipe can currently have two types of environments in Tempest: dedicated and preview (or ephemeral) environments.

Global Setup

Global setup is a section of a Tempest recipe. Any resources that’s shared across multiple environments — including Git repositories, DNS zones, and GCP cloud or AWS code build configurations — is typically provisioned under Global Setup.

Import policy

An import policy defines how to pull in your existing resources into Tempest for centralized management and easier visibility. They’re available for your various third-party providers, and once they’re set, they remain up to date with your resource provider so that any time there’s a change, it is also reflected in Tempest.

Orchestration

Orchestration in Tempest automates and seamlessly deploys projects by taking configured resources and managing their delivery from start to finish. It ensures projects reach a desired state with minimal manual intervention and operates on reasonable, secure defaults while transparently exposing its actions.

Organization

An organization in Tempest is a single, disparate entity that encompasses entire groups of teams, people, credentials, and policies. Information housed in one organization cannot be shared with another (unlike teams).

Preview environment

Preview environments (also known as ephemeral environments) create and destroy environment instances based on environment rules in recipes. This includes when a PR is open/closed, when a branch created/deleted, or when creating tags.

Project

Projects are groups of resources delivered together to form a single service. An example of a project built from Next.js is “My Org’s E-Commerce Website,” built ready with the relevant cloud resources required.

Recipe

Recipes are blueprints defined by your operations admin that specify configurations for a set of resources. They do not create resources but outline how they should be created. Engineers can use these pre-configured recipes to self-serve their project needs, ensuring adherence to required operations, security, compliance, and business standards.

Resource

A resource in Tempest represents a real-world infrastructural component or asset essential to your business, such as GitHub repositories, AWS object storage buckets, or DNS records. These resources are tracked and managed within Tempest, enabling seamless observation and lifecycle management as part of your projects.

Team

Teams encompass a group of people and are the main source of ownership in Tempest. Recipes, projects, resources, and apps can all be assigned to a team. Credentials, resources, and apps can all be shared among multiple teams—or siloed into individual teams if desired.

User-defined value

User-defined values can be used when configuring resources in a recipe, rather than pre-defining a variable. When a user-defined variable is selected, it leaves the value configurable by the developer when they choose your recipe to create a project.