> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.domino.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Domino overview
> What Domino is, how the platform is organized, and the principles it's built on.
Domino is a platform for building, delivering, and governing AI solutions for mission-critical use cases, typically in environments with strict compliance, regulatory, or infosec requirements. The platform increases agility and development speed while providing controls, so enterprises accelerate innovation without compromising safety.
Domino is built on a flexible orchestration engine that makes it easy to run arbitrary computational workloads in secured sandboxes, while automatically capturing reproducible results of those workloads and audit trails of what they did. This core capability makes Domino ideal for use cases where humans *and agents* need governed, controlled compute environments.
Common ways that organizations use Domino:
* As a governed app platform that empowers non-expert coders to build and deliver specialized software tools within their organization.
* As an execution orchestration platform for agents running in highly sensitive environments.
* As a model development and MLOps platform for predictive ML models in sensitive environments.
* As a modern Model Risk Management platform for models in financial services.
* As a Statistical Computing Environment for biostatistics work in pharmaceutical companies.
## Platform overview
Domino acts as a central access layer and interface for your preferred tools and resources (code, data, coding assistants, IDEs, packages, and compute) to construct AI solutions. Domino makes these materials accessible through self-serve but controlled access mechanisms, so that builders get streamlined access to the resources they need, and IT organizations can secure, track, and standardize access to their preferred tools and resources.
On top of this open (tool- and infrastructure-agnostic) orchestration capability, the platform provides user experiences and workflows that streamline the lifecycle of AI work:
1. **The AI Factory** is a set of capabilities that empowers builders to create models, AI systems such as agents, and other computational and quantitative research work. It lets builders use their preferred programming languages, IDEs, and compute frameworks while providing tailored user experiences for [experiment management](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/development/track-monitor), MLOps, [collaboration](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/collaboration), and more.
2. **The App & Agent Hub** is a place to host, serve, and distribute [apps](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/apps) and [agents](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/agents) to a broad spectrum of users within your organization. Domino provides scalability, security, and discoverability to make your apps and agents work at enterprise scale.
3. **The Governance Center** provides ways to manage different facets of AI work, such as [defining policies](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/governance/define-governance-policies) that enforce standards for lifecycle management, [FinOps](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/finops) for managing costs, and an [Audit Trail](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/governance/audit-trail) for tracking all actions taken in the platform.
## Guiding principles and core capabilities
### Integrate with your preferred tools and infrastructure
We believe different use cases demand different techniques, different builders have their own specific preferences, and the best innovation for particular methods and technologies comes from the open source and commercial ecosystem. We also know our customers have strict compliance or infosec requirements that often necessitate keeping work in their network perimeter or using specific technologies they already have.
To that end, Domino:
* Runs in your private cloud or on-premises infrastructure if necessary (we also have a managed SaaS offering, of course).
* Runs on any of the major cloud providers or in high-performance computing environments such as GPU clusters.
* Lets your builders use their preferred dev tools: IDEs, languages, packages, and [compute frameworks](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/compute-clusters-hpc).
* Connects to your [existing data sources](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/data), whether those are traditional databases, modern data lakes, or even legacy network file shares.
### Empower code-first builders
We've built Domino to be the best environment for builders using code to create AI and ML systems. That includes supporting best-of-breed coding assistants and IDEs in [Workspaces](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/workspaces), letting builders use their preferred desktop development tools, and [integrating with common Git providers](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/projects/git-based-projects).
### Governance is a foundational capability, not something bolted on
From the beginning, Domino has built in deep capabilities for [reproducibility](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/reproducibility), auditability, and lineage, which are critical for comprehensive [governance](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/governance).
### Standardization and reusability enable acceleration at scale
As teams grow, the biggest lever to sustain speed of innovation and development is not having faster or better models. Rather, it's having ways for people to [find and reuse work](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/collaboration/domino-search), having standard ways of working, facilitating collaboration and context sharing, enabling quick onboarding of new hires, and mitigating key-person risk. Domino makes this possible with capabilities such as [templates](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/projects/create-projects#create-a-project-from-a-template), search, taxonomies for organizing work, and discussion and collaboration features.
### Built for automation and agents as users
Everything in the platform is automatable via [APIs](/cloud/reference/api), both because mission-critical environments require repeatability and standardization, and because, increasingly, agents use the platform even more than humans.
### Extensibility and customizability
One size doesn't fit all, so we build Domino with customizability and configurability as first-class requirements. Through customization points and even [platform extensions](/cloud/platform-capabilities/features/extensions), customers make the platform fit for purpose in a variety of different use cases and workflows.
## Get started
* [For modelers and builders](/cloud/platform-overview/for-modelers-and-builders): hands-on tutorials in Python, R, and MATLAB.
* [Platform capabilities](/cloud/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/projects): the core concepts, starting with Projects.
## Related topics
- [Compute Environment Variables](/6.3/platform-capabilities/core-concepts/compute-environments/manage-compute-environments/manage-environment-variables/1-compute-environment-variables.md)
- [Domino QMS overview](/6.3/admin/quality-management-system.md)
- [Standard dashboards](/6.3/admin/operations/monitoring/grafana/dashboards.md)
- [Installation overview](/6.3/admin/installation/index.md)