# Architecture overview
URL: https://openship.io/docs/architecture/overview.md

How Openship is put together — the control plane, deploy targets, and where your data lives.

Openship runs either **self-hosted** or as **Openship Cloud** — the same codebase powers both, and a single environment flag (`OPENSHIP_TARGET`) decides which role an instance plays. This page is the map; the pages that follow go one level deeper.

## The control plane

Your instance — a self-hosted server, the desktop app, or the SaaS — is the control plane. It owns projects, deployments, domains, environment variables, and the permission model, and it is the only thing the dashboard talks to.

## Deploy targets

A project deploys to one of three targets:

- **local** — a container or process on the instance's own machine.
- **server** — an SSH-reachable server you've connected.
- **cloud** — Openship Cloud compute.

The target is resolved once per deploy and snapshotted, so preflight, the build pipeline, and rollback can never disagree on where a deployment lands.

## Where data lives

Local and server projects are canonical in your instance's own database. Cloud projects are canonical on Openship Cloud — a project is either fully local or fully cloud, never split. See [Cloud-as-source](/docs/architecture/cloud-as-source).