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:
- Kubernetes credentials — connect
kubectland other tools to your Okteto Namespace - Personal Access Tokens — authenticate CLI and API access
- Environment variables — manage secrets and configuration
User roles and permissions
Okteto uses role-based access control (RBAC) with two roles: Admin and Developer.
Networking
Endpoints
Okteto automatically generates HTTPS endpoints for your deployed services, with SSL certificates managed for you.
- Automatic SSL — auto-generated HTTPS endpoints for your services
- Private endpoints — restrict access to internal services
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.