Welcome to Pod-OS
A new way of thinking about data and computation can be daunting. We will help you through it. The concepts you will easily understand; once you have the conceptual models, they scale without change from the edge device to hypercomputers.
This documentation will walk you through the foundational ideas, then show you how to put them to work.
The Two Big Ideas
Everything in Pod-OS rests on three pillars:
- The Actor Model — every computation and data service you use is an Actor: an independent unit of computation that communicates only through messages, shares nothing, and can live anywhere on the network.
- Evolutionary Neural Memory (ENM) — a specific type of Actor that serves as a share-nothing, bidirectional graph database with next-generation capabilities for storing, querying, and evolving your data.
- Zero-Trust Security -- security in a concurrent, distributed environment is critically different. Pod-OS is built from the ground up to assume it is running in untrusted environments providing defense in depth:
Once you understand these two concepts, everything else in the platform is a natural consequence of them.
How to Read This Guide
We recommend you work through the pages in order:
| Page | What You Will Learn |
|---|---|
| What is a Gateway? | The entry point to your actor network — how traffic arrives and gets routed using Message-level RBAC |
| What is an Actor? | The fundamental unit of computation in Pod-OS and the Actor Model behind it |
| Deploy Actors with GitHub | Deploy Shell and Socket actors from GitHub using CI-built images or repo clone |
| What is an Evolutionary Neural Memory? | The next-gen database Actor that stores, connects and evolves your data |
| How do I structure data in my ENM? | Data modeling best practices for evolutionary graph-native thinking and/or neural memory data |
| IDs and Ownership | How Event Object IDs, principals, and ownership work across Pod-OS databases |
| How do I deploy an ENM? | Step-by-step deployment through the Pod-OS dashboard |
| How do I add data to an ENM? | Ingesting data using the Pod-OS SDKs |
| How do I query data in my ENM? | Retrieving and traversing your evolutionary data |
A Quick Mental Model
Think of Pod-OS like a city network:
- Gateways are the roads into city(ies) — they receive traffic and know how to direct it to services and child Gateways in their city(ies). Gateways also know how to direct traffic into other cities. Gateway also provide zero-trust security(trust no-one), managing the flow of messages based on permissions you manage.
- Actors are the buildings in a city or Gateway neighborhood — each one does a specific job, keeps its own state, and communicates by sending messages through the road network.
- Messages are the sole unit of Actor communication using a simple e-mail-like address for Actors: actor-name@gateway-domain ensures that the message arrives (subject to permission) at the correct Actor in the network(s).
Ready? Let's start with What is a Gateway?