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🧠 Core Components

At its heart, the OpenLabs lifecycle is simple: you define a Blueprint, deploy it to create a live Range, and can later save that Range as a Snapshot.

  • 🏗️ Blueprint: The YAML/JSON file that acts as a recipe for your lab. It defines every part of your environment: VPCs, subnets, hosts, and their configurations. A Blueprint doesn't represent any live cloud resources and doesn't cost anything.

  • ☁️ Range: The live, running version of a Blueprint. When you deploy a Blueprint, OpenLabs creates a Range, which consists of all the actual cloud resources (VMs, networks, etc.). This is the environment you interact with, and it is what incurs costs from your cloud provider.

  • 📸 Snapshot: A point-in-time backup of a Range. It saves the state of all hosts and the network configuration. You can use a Snapshot to restore a lab to a previous state or to deploy new, identical clones of the snapshotted range.

Below is a visualization of how these relate to each other:

Flowchart of the OpenLabs object lifecycle: A Blueprint is deployed into a Range; a Range can be exported back to a Blueprint or saved as a Snapshot, which can in turn be deployed to create a Range.