Concepts¶
1. Can OpsAny be used commercially? Does it cost money?¶
The OpsAny Community Edition is free to use indefinitely, including commercial use, at the user's own risk and responsibility. Any platform you build on the OpsAny development framework is your own copyrighted work. For production use in an enterprise, consider buying the official Enterprise Edition for more modules and support from the official team.
2. What are the PaaS platform and SaaS platforms?¶
OpsAny follows a PaaS platform plus SaaS applications model. The PaaS platform provides the base services — unified authentication (login), the API gateway (esb), the application management platform (appengine), and the developer center (paas). SaaS platforms are developed on the unified framework the PaaS provides, so every SaaS shares unified authentication and they call each other through ESB. If you can develop SaaS yourself, you need not deploy any OpsAny SaaS at all — just start building. You can also build on the APIs the OpsAny SaaS platforms expose, or build standalone SaaS platforms.
3. How is OpsAny's permission model designed, and how should I grant permissions?¶
- User roles
There are three roles: Administrator, Regular user, and Developer.
- Administrator: can see all data (see data permissions below) but not all pages; permissions must be granted by creating permission policies (see page permissions below).
- Regular user: sees only the pages and data that have been granted.
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Developer: like a regular user, but can open the Developer Center.
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Permission types
There are two kinds of permissions: page permissions and data permissions.
- Page permissions: which platform, which page, and which buttons a user can see. Configured in the 【Unified Permissions】 platform following the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) model, by creating "permission policies".
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Data permissions: which specific instances a user can see — which hosts, which scripts, which applications. Instance permissions are granted by creating authorization policies in the 【Resource Platform】. Exception: the 【Bastion Host】 authorizes independently through its own permission policies.
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Summary
Administrators see all data by default and need no data authorization, but the pages they can access must be granted. Regular users need both page and data authorization. This differs from public clouds: most public clouds have no CMDB concept, so page and data permissions are granted together. In OpsAny, data permissions are managed centrally by the 【Resource Platform】 CMDB.
Tip: if you create a regular user and grant it the administrator role, it still sees no resources — page permissions and data permissions are separate. A regular user must be granted data access regardless of which pages it can see.
4. Are there usage limits? Do you cap how many hosts I can onboard?¶
The OpsAny Community Edition has no usage limits whatsoever — we never built any.
5. Where should my operations career go from here?¶
If you are still figuring that out and have just come across OpsAny, we hope this last answer helps. A common problem in operations today is that engineers hold many skills but master very few domains — do you truly master monitoring, web architecture, DevOps? Or, narrowing it further, do you master Zabbix, Kubernetes, Ansible, or Jenkins? You need at least one skill you genuinely master; otherwise one day you will come back and read this answer again. Change is never the hard part — not starting is.
