# The basics

> 5050cloud organises your apps into projects, environments, services and deployments, the same way Railway does, and runs them on hosts you own.

5050cloud organises your apps into projects, environments, services and deployments, the same way Railway does, and runs them on hosts you own.

## Projects

A project is a canvas of services that belong together, such as an API, a web app, a worker and their databases. Create one from the dashboard with **New project** or with `5050 init`.

## Environments

Every project starts with a `production` environment. Add more (for example `staging`) from the environment menu at the top of the canvas or with `5050 environment new staging --duplicate production`. Each environment has its own services, variables, domains and private network. Environments cannot reach each other's services.

## Services

A service runs one thing: code from a GitHub repo, a Docker image, a directory uploaded with `5050 up`, or a database template. A service has settings (source, build, deploy, networking), variables, an optional volume and domains. Services are **web** (they take traffic), **worker** (no port) or **cron** (run on a schedule).

## Deployments

Each deploy creates a deployment: a build (or image pull), then containers started from it. A deployment keeps a snapshot of the image, settings and variables it ran with, so a rollback restores exactly that. The statuses are listed in [Deployment statuses](https://5050cloud.com/docs/reference/deployment-statuses).

## Variables

Variables are environment variables for a service. They can reference other services, as in `${{Postgres.DATABASE_URL}}`, or shared variables of the environment, as in `${{shared.API_KEY}}`. See [Variables and references](https://5050cloud.com/docs/guides/variables).

## Staged changes

Edits to settings and variables are staged first. A banner shows how many changes are waiting; **Details** shows the diff and **Deploy** applies them all at once. See [Staged changes](https://5050cloud.com/docs/guides/staged-changes).

## Hosts

A host is a Linux VM running the 5050cloud agent. The first host also runs the control plane and the console. Add more with one command; see [Add a host](https://5050cloud.com/docs/guides/add-a-host). Hosts have roles:

| Role | What it does |
|---|---|
| `app` | Runs app replicas |
| `ingress` | Serves public traffic on ports 80 and 443 |
| `data` | Runs databases and other services with volumes |
| `build` | Builds images |

The first host has every role.

## Next steps

- [Quick start](https://5050cloud.com/docs/quick-start)
- [Coming from Railway](https://5050cloud.com/docs/coming-from-railway)
- [Architecture](https://5050cloud.com/docs/reference/architecture)