Domains and Routes

Helion Stackato can serve applications on any domain or virtual hostname, provided a DNS record exists to resolve the URL to the IP address of the Helion Stackato network gateway (a Helion Stackato router or load balancer).

Routers recognize the hostnames and domains configured on the system, and route web requests to the appropriate application containers.

Web applications are given a hostname-domain combination called a route (the application URL).

  • hostnames are attached to most applications
  • domains belong to organizations

Domains

A domain in Helion Stackato is a fully-qualified, second-level or lower domain name (for example, example.com or stackato.example.com). There are two categories of these:

  • Shared domains are set up by a Helion Stackato administrator which are available globally to all organizations. Applications deployed by any organization can use these domains for their URLs.
  • Owned domains domains can be used only by applications deployed in a specific organization. organization managers can add these domains in the Domains view or using the stackato create-domain command.

Spaces within an organization inherit all its domains. Applications within these spaces can use any of these domains to make application routes.

Routes

A route is an application URL. Usually, this is made up of a virtual hostname followed by a domain (for example, myapp.example.com) or sub-domain (for example, myapp.myorg.example.com). An application can be deployed with a blank hostname, in which case its URL will consist only of the mapped domain (example.com).

Routes must be globally unique, and Helion Stackato enforces this if you attempt to launch an application with the same route as an existing application. Such namespace collisions can be avoided by assigning unique domains (or sub-domains) to each organization.