---
title: Cloud boundary
description: How a self-hosted instance talks to Openship Cloud without leaking local identity — proxied requests carry the owner's cloud session and nothing else.
---

When you connect the copy of Openship you run yourself to Openship Cloud, the two
stay cleanly separated. Think of it like a border crossing between two countries:
your instance is one side, the Cloud is the other, and every request that crosses
shows a single passport — the organization owner's cloud session — and carries
nothing from home. No local ID cards, no house keys, no return address.

<Callout title="The two sides">
- **Self-hosted instance** — the Openship you run on your own machine or server.
  It is the single **control plane** and **permission plane**: the layer that
  decides who may do what. Every request is checked here first.
- **Openship Cloud** — the hosted service at `https://api.openship.io`. It is the
  **upstream authority** (the final say) for any project that lives on the Cloud.
- **Proxy** — when a request is for a Cloud-owned project, your instance *forwards*
  it upstream instead of answering itself. That forwarding step is the boundary,
  and it is where all the rules below apply.
</Callout>

## One gateway, one identity

All Cloud-project traffic goes through **one** place in the code and travels as the
organization owner's cloud session. Only requests that first pass your local
permission checks ever reach the Cloud — the proxy runs *after* the permission
gate, so there is no back door to the Cloud that skips local access control.

Who is the "owner"? Only the org owner can link a Cloud account (linking is guarded
by an owner-role check), and their session becomes the org's single cloud identity.
Every member's cloud action — deploy, analytics, domains, GitHub — runs under that
one identity, resolved the same way everywhere, so the dashboard and the deploy path
can never disagree about who is acting.

Proxying does not make a request invisible at home. The forwarding step runs *inside*
your local permission middleware, so the same local audit entry is written for a
proxied Cloud action as for a local one — your instance still records who did what,
even though the Cloud carries it out.

## What crosses the boundary — and what never does

When your instance proxies a request upstream, it rebuilds the request from
scratch. It forwards only:

- the HTTP **method** (`GET`, `POST`, …),
- the **path** and query string,
- the request **body** (for writes),
- the **Content-Type** header,
- an **Authorization** header holding the owner's cloud session token (added by
  the transport layer, never taken from the incoming request).

Everything else is dropped on purpose. In particular, the proxy forwards **none**
of these:

| Never forwarded | Why |
|---|---|
| Local session cookies | Browser sign-in is local-only; the Cloud never sees it. |
| `X-Organization-Id` | The Cloud resolves the org from the owner's token, not a header. A local org id is meaningless upstream (local org id ≠ Cloud org id) and would be a footgun. |
| `X-Project-Source` and other client hints | Routing hints stay local. |
| `Host` / the original origin | The request is re-addressed to `api.openship.io`. |

<Callout title="The invariant" type="info">
A proxied request forwards **only method, path, body, and Content-Type**, plus the
owner's cloud bearer token. No local session, no local organization id, and no
local host ever cross. This rule is written down and enforced in the single proxy
module — the one place that forwards an inbound request to the Cloud backend.
</Callout>

## Your local id can't be smuggled upstream

Because `X-Organization-Id` is stripped, a caller cannot hand the Cloud a local
identifier and have it act on some other org's data. The Cloud works out which
organization a request belongs to entirely from the owner's bearer token: it looks
the token up in its own session table and derives the user — and therefore the org
— from that trusted server-side record. There is no field in a proxied request
that a local bug, or a local attacker, could set to point at someone else's cloud
data.

## No hybrids

- **A Cloud project has no local row.** Your instance keeps zero database records
  for it; for a cloud project it is only ever a gateway. So a local bug or a botched
  migration can't reach into Cloud-owned data — there is nothing local to corrupt.
- **A local (or server) project never runs on Cloud compute.** The two worlds do
  not share execution.
- **Same 404 for a stranger's id.** Ask for a cloud project id that your org has no
  link to, and you get the exact same "not found" as asking for a completely
  foreign id — your instance won't even reveal that it exists. This closes an
  **IDOR** (insecure direct object reference — guessing another tenant's id to read
  their data).

## The stored credential

The only cloud secret your instance keeps is the owner's cloud session token. It is:

- **Encrypted at rest** — stored as AES-256-GCM (authenticated encryption)
  ciphertext in the owner's settings row, and decrypted only server-side at the
  moment of an outbound call.
- **Never exposed to the browser** — the dashboard never receives the token. It
  lives server-side and is presented as a bearer only on the call that leaves your
  instance. No client-side cookie or token is involved in cloud traffic at all.
- **Checked live** — "connected?" is answered by asking the Cloud, not by the token
  merely existing on disk. A token the Cloud rejects with `401` on its identity
  endpoint is cleared automatically; a transient `5xx` is not treated as a
  disconnect.

<Callout title="Optional: pin sessions to a device" type="info">
On the Cloud side, linked-instance sessions can be **pinned** to the IP address and
User-Agent recorded when the session was created, using the `CLOUD_SESSION_PINNING`
setting. The default is `warn` — a mismatch is logged but the request is still
allowed; `off` skips the check entirely; `strict` rejects the request with `401` on
a mismatch. Strict mode catches a stolen token replayed from a different network or
client, at the cost of breaking users who switch carriers or VPNs.
</Callout>

## What next?

<Cards>
  <Card title="Cloud as source" href="/docs/architecture/cloud-as-source" description="Why cloud projects are owned upstream, and how projects promote up and come back home." />
  <Card title="Data ownership" href="/docs/architecture/data-ownership" description="Where your data lives when you self-host, and how to export everything with no lock-in." />
  <Card title="Permission model" href="/docs/security/permissions" description="Roles, grants, and the single permission plane every request passes through first." />
  <Card title="Organization isolation" href="/docs/security/isolation" description="Personal vs. team workspaces and how projects stay isolated from one another." />
</Cards>
