Core Concepts

ModStack is built around five primary constructs. Together they form a hierarchy that takes you from a business problem all the way down to a running, reusable deployment.

The Five Constructs

Project →

The business boundary. A logical container for a single business use case — an initiative, a platform, or a service — with isolated billing, access, and governance.

Environment →

The deployment boundary. An isolated instance of your stack — dev, staging, production, or local.

Service →

The unit of deployment. Any containerised workload: web server, worker, database, or cron job.

Module →

Collections of services that can be versioned and distributed.

Blueprint →

The exportable deployment template. Captures a complete environment — its modules, config, and topology — for repeatable, one-step deployment.

How They Relate

The constructs nest inside each other. A Project is the outer boundary; Services are the innermost deployable unit. Modules group related Services into reusable capabilities, and a Blueprint snapshots an entire Environment so it can be reproduced anywhere.

Hierarchy 
Project
  └── Environment
        ├── Services        (direct deployment)
        └── Modules
              └── Services

Environment  ──►  (Export as)  Blueprint

Each construct answers a distinct question: Project — what problem? Environment — where and how? Service — what runs? Module — what is reused? Blueprint — how is it reproduced?