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The shape of the platform

Eugo has four nested concepts. Most confusion about the platform comes from collapsing two of them together, so the containment comes first.

The nesting​

Organization                  ← owns workspaces, holds the plan, is the billing boundary
└── Workspace                 ← isolated environment: storage, libraries, resource allocation
    ├── Interactive session   ← a running EugoIDE in your browser (where you write code)
    └── Cluster               ← head node + compute nodes (where code runs at scale)

Reading it outside-in: an organization owns one or more workspaces. Inside a workspace you open an interactive session to write code, and launch a cluster to run it.

What each one is for​

Organization. The account. It owns workspaces, holds the pricing plan whose limits everything inside inherits, and is where members and their roles live. It is the unit of billing.

Workspace. An isolated compute environment. It has its own persistent storage, its own installed libraries, and its own resource allocation. Teams typically get one workspace per team, per project, or per environment. The boundary matters because storage and limits follow it.

Interactive session. A running EugoIDE instance. Ephemeral in the sense that you start and stop it, but attached to workspace storage, so your files persist beyond it. Holds resources while open.

Cluster. Machines launched on demand to run distributed work. A head node schedules; compute nodes execute. Exists only between launch and shutdown, and bills for that whole interval.

The distinction that matters most​

A session is not a cluster.

A session is one machine running your notebook. A cluster is many machines running your tasks. You write code in the session; the session dispatches work to the cluster.

You can have a session with no cluster. That is just a notebook, and perfectly normal. You would not have a cluster with no session, because there would be nothing driving it.

Conflating the two produces the most common beginner question: "I started a session, why isn't my code parallel?" A session is one machine. Parallelism needs a cluster, plus code that dispatches work to it.

Two things bill separately​

Both a session and a cluster consume resources for as long as they exist:

  • An open session with nobody typing in it still bills.
  • An idle cluster after its job finished bills exactly like a busy one.

The second is the larger number and the one organizations most often leak money on.

What comes next​

Interactive sessions vs. clusters takes the two halves of that picture apart: where you write code, where it runs, and how work travels between them.

Terms like task, future, actor, and worker appear unprefixed from here on. Each has a glossary entry with its own page, so look one up the moment it stops being obvious rather than reading a list of definitions up front.