Projects

A project is the unit of isolation on NimbusNexus — for resources, billing, and access control. Every resource (VM, volume, bucket, database, network, …) belongs to exactly one project; every API key is scoped to exactly one project; every invoice line is for exactly one project.

Why projects matter

Three guarantees the project boundary gives you:

1. Blast radius. A compromised API key for the dev project can't touch prod resources. They literally aren't visible from inside dev.
2. Cost attribution. Each project gets its own bill. If finance wants to charge marketing for the website's hosting bill, marketing gets a project. If engineering wants to allocate spend per team, each team gets a project.
3. Quota. Quotas are per-project. One project running away with VM creates doesn't drain another project's headroom.

Project hierarchy

Projects can have a parent project (organization tier and up). The hierarchy looks like:

acme-org (root)
├── acme-prod
├── acme-staging
└── acme-dev

A user with the admin role on acme-org automatically inherits admin on every child. A user with admin only on acme-prod can't see acme-staging or acme-dev. This is the standard mechanism for "centralized governance, decentralized day-to-day."

Hierarchy is optional. Default-tier accounts get one root project per account; organization-tier accounts can build trees up to 5 levels deep.

What lives in a project

• VMs, volumes, snapshots, backups
• Buckets, archives
• Databases
• Networks, subnets, routers, security groups, floating IPs, load balancers
• DNS zones + records
• Users, roles + assignments, API keys
• The billing account that pays for all of the above

Projects can't be merged. To consolidate two projects, you'd export-and-reimport the resources and delete the original — there's no atomic merge operation, deliberately, because the resulting "what got merged where" attribution would be unauditable.

Deletion

DELETE /v1/projects/{id} is destructive and irreversible. Every resource inside the project is destroyed: VMs, volumes, snapshots, backups, buckets, databases, DNS zones — all of it. The user records and role assignments are revoked atomically.

For safety the API requires a confirmation header (X-Confirm-Project-Delete: <project-id>) on this call; without it the request returns 400.

What's next

• Users — the identities inside a project.
• Roles — what users hold to do anything.
• Quotas — per-project resource limits.