Overview

Pad is built around a few core primitives.

Pad

A running or stopped cloud development environment. Each Pad has lifecycle state, a bound VM, and metadata. Pads are the primary product primitive. See .

Template

A reusable base configuration. A Template defines the base VM image and defaults that new Pads inherit. List templates with pad templates.

Padfile

A declarative TOML file in your repo that describes how a Pad should be created: which Template to use, which repo to clone, which commands to run on setup and on every start, which ports to expose, and which secrets and AI agents to attach. See and the .

Host and VM

A Host is a persistent unit of capacity on our bare metal servers. A VM is a Firecracker microVM running on a Host. Each Pad binds to a VM. You don't manage Hosts or VMs directly; they're allocated automatically when you run pad up.