Define the Vault Structure

Termius enables your team to collaborate efficiently: manage infrastructure, set granular access, and connect with one click. This article is for those who oversee and manage infrastructure for their team. It contains principles and examples to help you find the organizational structure that would work best for your team.

Foundational principles

Most SSH clients store sessions as separate connection strings. This adds mental load when multiple protocols can be used with the same remote device. Termius simplifies this by using Hosts to represent the remote machine with all the protocols used to connect.

TL;DR
Hosts tell you what remote machine it is.
Groups tell you where it is.
Vaults tell you who can access it.

Hosts are defined by IP address and include metadata, like labels and tags, that help with search and navigation. Each protocol you need to access the machine can be set inside that Host. For example, you can set up SSH with a port, credentials, and a jump host, while also configuring Telnet with a different port and credentials.

Groups are collections of Hosts that share something in common, like a customer, location, or environment. A nested structure helps organize Hosts and make navigation simple. Groups can also have protocol settings inherited by all Hosts in the Group.

Vaults are the top level of organization designed for access control. This end-to-end encrypted storage for all your data in Termius: Hosts, Groups, Keys, Snippets, Port Forwarding rules, and Known Hosts. Vaults let you give different members access to different resources.

Examples

Small Startup

The team structure is flat, with a few members and high trust.

• Vaults: High trust allows using a single Team vault shared with everyone on the team.

• Groups: Prod, Staging, and Development.

Consulting Company

The team structure is pod-based, where small teams or individuals work with several clients.

• Vaults: Each client has a separate vault. Team members are added and removed from vaults depending on the projects and clients they work with.

• Groups are used to separate environments within the client's vault.

Mid-size Business

The team structure is functional-based, with dedicated DevOps, Developers, and QA teams.

• Vaults: Vaults separate Production, Development, and Staging environments. DevOps has access to all three. Developers can access Staging and Dev, while QA can only access Staging.

• Groups: Within each vault, there are groups for different resource types, such as Database Servers (DB), Web Servers, and Cache.

Enterprise

Enterprise companies have a department-based structure, each working on its part of the infrastructure.

• Vaults: Each department, such as network administrators, DevOps, developers, and support, has a dedicated vault.

• Groups: Each team has a different group structure relevant to their use case. For example, a Network Team can have a location-based structure where root groups define the site (city or region), nested groups define the building, and then floor, room, and rack.