Core concepts at a glance - Domino

Ways to build

Concept	What it is
Workspaces	A self-serve interactive development environment using the IDE of your choice, designed to feel like a “laptop in the cloud.” Intended for exploratory analysis and interactive development.
Jobs	A batch run of a script or command, fully reproducible, for training, simulation, and data processing. Can be run manually, via APIs, or on a schedule.
Experiments	Useful primarily when developing machine learning models, Experiments provide a way to track, organize, and compare different model configurations you’re testing.
Flows	Multi-step computation graphs. A good fit for data engineering tasks or MLOps tasks.
Compute clusters	Frameworks for running highly parallelizable workloads, including Spark, Ray, Dask, and Slurm. Domino can attach clusters to Workspaces, Jobs, and other workloads and manages the necessary infrastructure, including autoscaling.

Use data

Concept	What it is
Datasets	Versioned filesystem storage for large data, shared across Projects, with strong features for reproducibility.
NetApp Volumes	Like Datasets but backed by NetApp ONTAP storage, with near-instant snapshots regardless of size. Use them wherever your organization runs ONTAP.
Data Sources	Connectors to external databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and object stores such as Amazon S3.
External Data Volumes	Network-attached storage, such as network file system (NFS) shares or Windows shares, mounted into the workloads you run.

Productize what you build

Concept	What it is
Domino endpoints	An HTTP API wrapped around your code, meant for real-time inference tasks such as classification and scoring.
Apps	Interactive web applications built with frameworks such as Streamlit, Dash, Shiny, Flask, or any other web framework. Domino handles routing, authentication, and scaling.
Agents	Programs that use a large language model (LLM) to plan and act across multiple steps. Domino hosts and serves them alongside Apps and traces them for evaluation and monitoring.
Launchers	Self-serve web forms that run a predefined Job with the parameters a less technical user fills in. Useful for turning scripts into simple web interfaces.

Govern

Concept	What it is
LLM Gateway	A router that lets you direct LLM calls to any underlying model, with usage tracking, cost controls, and guardrails. Contact your Domino field team for access.
Governance policies	Policies define the stages, required evidence, and required approvals that a work product, such as an App or model, must go through as it’s built. Used to enforce standards for internal workflows and compliance policies.
FinOps	Manage and monitor infrastructure spend.
Audit Trail	A record of user activity for compliance verification, security investigations, and audit reporting.

Collaborate, reproduce, and manage knowledge

Concept	What it is
Projects	A shared space for people to collaborate with access to the same set of code, data, results, and history. The primary way of organizing work in Domino.
Reproducibility	Domino keeps records of all the “inputs” for most deliverables and results you create in the platform: the code, data, and Compute Environment that produced a given result or Model or App.
Search	Domino indexes contents in the platform so you can find and reuse past work easily.
Project templates	A Project pre-configured with code, data, and other materials, to be used as a starting point for new Projects to help people use best practices and avoid re-inventing the wheel.
Tags and Properties	Tags are controlled, hierarchical labels for categorizing and finding assets. Properties are typed custom fields that enrich them.

Architecture and administration

Concept	What it is
Compute orchestration	Domino runs every workload as a container on Kubernetes. A cluster autoscaler adds compute capacity as demand grows.
Hybrid and multicloud compute	One Domino deployment can run workloads in several regions, clouds, or on-premises data centers, each a Data Plane attached to the same Control Plane.
Compute Environments	A versioned, shareable definition of the tools and packages a workload runs in, built from a Docker image, so everyone runs the same software.
Hardware Tiers	Administrator-defined compute profiles (CPU, memory, GPU) that you pick when launching a workload. Access can be limited to an organization.

Last modified on October 6, 2026

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