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Version: 1.51

Core Concepts

Okteto organizes development around isolated Namespaces, built-in networking, a remote Build Service, and a central manifest that ties everything together. These concepts apply whether you are deploying a single service or managing a multi-team platform.

Environment and access​

Namespaces​

Namespaces are isolated workspaces where Development Environments run. Each developer gets a personal Namespace, and you can create shared Namespaces for team collaboration.

Credentials​

Okteto supports three types of credentials to access your environments:

User roles and permissions​

Okteto uses role-based access control (RBAC) with two roles: Admin and Developer.

Networking​

Endpoints​

Endpoints expose the applications deployed in your Namespaces on HTTPS. Okteto creates them from:

  • HTTPRoutes — your own Gateway API HTTPRoutes, attached to the Okteto Gateway
  • Docker Compose — endpoints declared in your Docker Compose file
  • Ingress — your own Ingress objects, with generated hostnames
  • Services — annotate a Service and Okteto creates the endpoint
  • Custom Endpoints: customize the endpoints shown in the Okteto UI with annotations
  • Private Endpoints: restrict access to internal applications

Divert​

Divert routes traffic across microservice environments so you only deploy the services you are modifying, connecting to shared versions of everything else.

Build and configuration​

Okteto Manifest​

The Okteto Manifest (okteto.yaml) is the central configuration for building, deploying, testing, and developing your application in Okteto. It defines everything from build targets to Development Container settings.

Okteto Variables​

Okteto Variables let you save configuration values and inject them automatically at deployment time. Variables can be scoped to a Namespace, user, or Admin level.

Build Service​

The Okteto Build Service builds container images remotely and pushes them automatically to Okteto Registry.

Container registry​

Each Okteto Namespace has its own space in Okteto Registry to store and pull images.

Remote Execution​

Remote Execution runs your deploy, test, and destroy commands in the cluster rather than on your local machine, ensuring consistent, reproducible operations.

Data and observability​

Insights dashboards​

Okteto Insights tracks build times, deploy frequency, resource usage, and user activity across your cluster.

Volume Snapshots​

Volume Snapshots let you initialize a persistent volume from a previous snapshot, so you can seed Development Environments with realistic data.