User Guide
How to use the IronSled Portal — the web application teams use to create projects, manage teams and secrets, deploy and troubleshoot applications, browse container images, and view security reports.
This User Guide shows you how to get your work done in the IronSled Portal, the web application you use day to day on the IronSled platform. IronSled is built from many tools — GitLab for source and CI/CD, Rancher for Kubernetes, AWS for hosting, Nexus for artifacts and images, Okta for access, and more. The portal ties them together into a single interface, so you can manage your software without operating each underlying system directly.
This guide is written for people who use the platform to build and ship applications. If you administer the platform itself (tenant operations, user access, Okta sync), see Platform → Administration.
What You Can Do
Start here if you're new:
- Getting Access — Get your Portal account, GitLab access, a Personal Access Token, and Git set up so you can start working.
Work on your application:
- Projects — The central organizational unit. A project links your team to its repositories, pipelines, environments, container images, and security posture, with an at-a-glance health view. Most of your work happens inside a project.
- Create a Project — Bring a new application onto the platform through an AI-assisted onboarding flow that provisions repositories, environments, and access.
- Manage Your Team — Add and remove members and assign roles, which the portal syncs to your identity provider (Okta/Entra) and GitLab for you.
- Managing Secrets — Where secrets live for your app — GitLab CI/CD variables for pipelines and the External Secrets Operator for runtime (the Portal itself has no secrets screen).
- Deploy & Troubleshoot — How your app is deployed (GitOps and Helm) and how to watch and troubleshoot it via the Environments section and Rancher.
- View Security Reports — Generate velocity, vulnerability, SBOM, and compliance reports for your project in the Reports & Artifacts section.
- Request Infrastructure — Ask the platform team for new infrastructure (environments, databases, storage, networking) with AI-assisted parsing and a tracked request lifecycle.
Browse and collaborate:
- Hub — Browse the curated library of secure, team-maintained container base images (built and maintained by the IronSled platform team) directly from the portal.
- Service Delivery — IronSled service expectations and shared responsibilities for platform users.
How the Portal Fits In
The portal does not replace the platform's underlying tools — it orchestrates them. When you create a project, manage a team, or submit a request in the portal, it coordinates the matching actions across GitLab, Rancher, Okta, and Nexus on your behalf. That lets you focus on building and shipping your application while the platform handles provisioning, security scanning, and compliance.