Skip to main content
Monk runs your app either on your own machine (local mode) or on a cluster. A cluster is a group of machines in your cloud account, called nodes or peers, each running Monk’s orchestrator. You own the machines, and your cloud provider bills you for them.

​
Providers

Monk asks for credentials through a form in the local dashboard the first time it needs them. They are stored on your machine. See Security. For help choosing a provider, see Choose a cloud.

​
Local mode

In local mode the orchestrator runs on your computer and deploys there. Nothing is created in the cloud. Local mode suits trying a configuration before you pay for machines. It can also use cloud credentials without creating a cluster, for projects that only manage cloud services, such as a GCP Cloud Run service defined as a Monk entity.

​
Creating a cluster

To create a cluster, Monk needs:
  • a name
  • the provider, region and zone (AWS and GCP need a zone)
  • the instance type and the number of nodes
  • optionally, tags and GPU accelerators
Monk can list a provider’s valid regions, zones and instance types, with CPU and memory for each, so it picks real values and doesn’t have to guess. You review the cluster plan and its estimated cost in the local dashboard before anything is provisioned. A new cluster belongs to your personal account or to an organization, depending on how the workspace is bound. See Teams and access.

​
Growing and changing a cluster

  • Grow adds nodes to the active cluster. It doesn’t check region and instance values in advance, so check them against the catalog first.
  • Remove a node takes a single peer out of the cluster.
  • Tags on nodes control where workloads are placed. One reserved system tag is managed by Monk.
  • Delete tears down the selected cluster and its machines. It asks for approval and follows the cluster’s delete policy.
  • Switch, exit and forget change which saved cluster your machine is connected to, or remove a saved cluster record.
Each cluster has a monkcode, which the web dashboard can copy. It lets someone with access connect their machine to the cluster. See Scale and resize for the common requests.

​
Estimates and prices

Before you create or grow a cluster, Monk can estimate its hourly and monthly cost from the node specification. The estimate includes Monk’s infrastructure fee. Once a cluster exists, Monk can report its current price. See Cost and usage.

​
GPUs

Monk can list the GPU accelerators it can attach for a given provider, region and instance type. Today that means GCP n1-* instance types. Check the name before creating nodes, because an invalid accelerator is only rejected after the nodes are provisioned and billed. Instance types with GPUs built in show that in the catalog.

​
The private registry

Each cluster can run its own private container registry. Monk pushes the images it builds there, and CI/CD pushes there too, so you don’t need an outside registry account. Monk can check the registry, enable it, and reset its credentials. If a registry certificate has expired, Monk can request a fresh one for the node.

​
Binding clusters to projects and environments

A cluster can be bound to an organization, a project and an environment. The binding decides where deploys for that environment go. If a cluster was created before its project existed, or should move to another project or environment, Monk can bind it again. Several environments can share one cluster. See Environments and previews.

Choose a cloud

Picking a provider, region and size

Move to another cloud

Running the app on a second provider

Networking

Ingress, domains and certificates

Obtaining credentials

What each provider needs