Nodes and accounts

A node is one Cloudoak backend that someone runs: a single program, two Postgres databases and S3-compatible file storage. A person, a family or a company runs their own. Nothing in Cloudoak is shared between nodes.

Accounts live on the node. Your users have accounts on their node, not with you. When your app needs a user, it sends them to their node’s own sign-in page; the node asks them to approve your app, and gives your app tokens for that one installation. An app access token lasts five minutes, and every request is checked again, so when a user disconnects your app, it stops working on the next request.

Data lives on the node too, one schema per installed app: the tables, documents, vectors and files your manifest declares. Clients never send SQL; they call the API (usually through the SDK), and the manifest’s permissions decide who reads and writes what.

Live updates are polling. Your app asks the node’s change feed what changed since a cursor. There is no push channel, no server-sent events and no WebSockets.

Credits and usage are the node’s own: its owner decides what things cost there, and users see their balance and usage in the node’s console.