Functional Documentation
Atlas is a self-hosted platform that runs at home and provides a small handful of services to me, my family and a few friends. Everything is described here from a user's point of view — what the platform does, who interacts with it, and what value each service delivers. The engineering choices behind it live in the Technical Documentation.
What Atlas is, in one paragraph
Atlas turns a single machine sitting in my home into a small, opinionated cloud. Anyone with an account can sign in once and reach a personal image registry, monitoring dashboards, and a secret vault, all behind real domain names and real TLS certificates. The whole stack is described as code and rebuilt by pushing to a Git repository — there is no manual server administration.
Scope and non-goals
| In scope | Out of scope |
|---|---|
| Single bare-metal node at home | Multi-node HA cluster |
| A small group of trusted users (single-digit count) | Public SaaS or anonymous users |
| GitOps-driven deployment | Click-ops administration |
| Self-hosted identity, registry, secrets, observability, code quality, home automation | Mail server, file sync, media streaming (later, separate projects) |
| Free / open-source software only | Paid managed services for core infra |
Documentation map
| Page | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Personas | Who interacts with Atlas and what they need from it |
| Services | The catalog of user-facing services and what each one is for |
| Workflows | End-to-end journeys: signing in, pushing an image, viewing a dashboard, recovering from a backup |