Before deploying your application, there are a few terms to learn, as they are used throughout this guide.
Application
An application (or app) is the software package you are installing onto your customer’s servers. It isn’t a single binary, rather it’s all of the individual components which make your product.
Channel
Channels are used to stage out releases for customers or customer segments. By default there are Stable, Beta and Nightly channels.
Release
A release is a version of the application, complete with release notes & version number.
Ship OSS / Ship CLI
Replicated Ship is an Open Source Software tool that customers run locally, like an installer, to configure the initial site-specific options for a Replicated application. It also provides a way to integrate updates of that application into a customer’s existing continuous integration & deployment pipeline, and to make update releases available as Pull Requests into infrastructure-as-code respositories.
Replicated Ship can also be used to manage off-the-shelf commercial or open source applications packaged as raw Kubernetes YAML or Helm Charts.
Ship Cloud / Ship Hosted
Ship Cloud is a hosted solution that enables individuals or teams to collaborate and manage multiple applications with Ship, without the overhead of operating and maintaining a fleet of Ship instances.