Organizations

An organization is the tenant that owns everything you do in Gallium. Every deployment, virtual machine, cluster, template, and member belongs to exactly one organization, and nothing is shared between them. When you want to know where a resource lives, the answer is always an organization.

Your Account and Your Organizations

Your Gallium account and your organization are separate things. One account is one identity, and that identity can hold membership in any number of organizations. Belonging to a second organization does not mean a second account, a second password, or a second sign-in.

This is why an invitation works the way it does. Inviting someone who already uses Gallium attaches their existing identity to your organization, so they accept it from their own profile rather than by creating anything new. For the roles a member can hold and how invitations are sent and accepted, see Managing Users.

Each membership is scoped to its own organization. What you can see and do in one organization says nothing about your access in another, and the organization you are working in is always the first segment of the Console URL.

Members Managed by an Identity Provider

Members provisioned through single sign-on are the exception. Their identity lives in your directory rather than in Gallium, so they belong to one organization and cannot join or create others. They also have no Gallium password or multi-factor authentication, because your identity provider handles both. See Single Sign-On.

Name and Short Name

Every organization carries two names, and only one of them is permanent.

The short name is the organization’s true identifier. It is offered to you at creation, derived from the name you type, and you can replace it with something else before you commit. After that it cannot be changed, so choose one you will still want in the URL later.

Parent and Child Organizations

Organizations nest. A parent organization holds child organizations, each a full organization in its own right with its own resources, members, and license program. Service providers use this to keep customer environments separate while managing them from one place.

Nesting changes who administers an organization, not what an organization is. A child organization owns its resources exactly as any other does, and its members are its own.

How an Organization Is Created

Signing up for Gallium creates an account and its first organization together; there is no separate account to set up first, and whoever creates the organization becomes its Owner.

An existing account can end up belonging to no organization, usually after being removed from its last one. Signing in then offers two ways forward: accept a pending invitation to join someone else’s organization, or create a new one.