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Deployment, in plain English.
You built something with AI and now the internet is throwing words at you — deploy, runtime, cron, SSL. Here's what each one actually means, without the jargon.
Seven words worth knowing.
Deployment
Taking the code you (or an AI) wrote and putting it somewhere it can run on its own, away from your laptop. “Deploying” is the trip from a file on your machine to something running in the cloud.
In Snapdock: you upload the file; it deploys automatically — no steps to script.
Hosting
The place your code lives and runs after you deploy it — a computer in the cloud that stays on, so your automation keeps working whether or not your laptop is.
In Snapdock: the hosting is managed for you. There's no server to rent, patch, or keep alive.
Runtime
The environment your code runs in — the version of Python and the libraries it needs. Get the runtime wrong and the code errors out before it does anything.
In Snapdock: the runtime and your dependencies are auto-detected — no version to pin, no requirements.txt to hand-wrangle.
Cron job
A schedule that runs a task automatically at set times — “every day at 6am,” “every hour.” The name comes from an old Unix tool with famously fiddly syntax.
In Snapdock: you pick a schedule in plain English (or paste real cron if you like). No crontab to hand-edit.
Environment variables
Settings and secrets — like API keys — kept outside your code instead of pasted into it. Your script reads them at runtime, so keys never live in the code itself.
In Snapdock: they live in an encrypted Secrets vault, injected at runtime and never written to logs.
Domain
The human-friendly web address — like snapdock.ai — that points to where something runs, instead of a raw string of numbers (an IP address).
Good to know: a scheduled automation doesn't need its own domain to run; a domain matters when something serves a web page or an API.
SSL
The encryption behind the s in https and the padlock in your browser. It keeps data between a browser and a server private; a site without it gets flagged “not secure.”
Good to know: the run summaries and share links Snapdock gives you are served over https, so they're encrypted by default.
Now put it to work.
Deploy and run any workflow or automation.
No card to start — no servers, no Docker, no YAML.