Full Linux OS containers with root access for your applications + managed, highly available services. Built-in flexible CI/CD pipeline. Powerful, yet sensible YAML configs. Nothing abstracted beyond recognition. SSH, cron, apt-get, hostname:port — everything works the way you already know.
Container efficiency.
VM-level access.
Most platforms run your code in application containers — a single process in a locked-down filesystem. You've probably worked around the limitations so many times you stopped noticing them.
That background job running as a separate service because your platform won't allow two processes? That's an app container constraint. The video processing pipeline that shells out to a third-party API because you can't install ffmpeg? App container. The production issue you debugged blind because there's no SSH? App container.
System containers share the host kernel — so you get container-fast startup and density — but run a full Linux userspace. Install system packages. Run multiple processes. SSH in. Set up cron jobs. It's your environment, not a sandbox with guardrails.
Same services. Same networking.
Same pipeline. Different scale.
"But it works on my machine."
Matching production isn't about running the same software. It's about running the same infrastructure. Postgres in Docker Compose isn't managed Postgres with replication and failover. A local Redis instance isn't a cluster with eviction policies. Load balancing, TLS termination, object storage, CORS — missing or faked. Anything complex enough — Elasticsearch, message queues, vector databases — gets skipped or outsourced to a third party that behaves nothing like production.
Zerops doesn't have environment tiers. There are just projects — same managed services, same private networking, same load balancers, same pipeline. A project becomes dev, stage, or production by the resources you give it. Nothing else changes.
Develop your way.
Your agent works the same way.
Cloud IDE without browser lock-in. Local setup without machine lock-in. Coding agent with real platform reach.
Every Zerops project is a private network with managed services and a deploy pipeline. Develop against it locally or remotely. Run zcli vpn up and your laptop's psql hits db:5432 directly. Open the Cloud IDE for a clean browser session. SSH from your native VS Code, JetBrains, or Cursor into a runtime container. Switching paths is moving the cursor, not the project.
Same access for a coding agent. Bring your own LLM, and ZCP makes it a Zerops power user — platform knowledge that follows your project's state and the task at hand, plus tools to operate every part of Zerops. It deploys through the pipeline, reads logs, verifies behavior, and ends a session with a URL or a concrete blocker. Security is solved at the architecture level: dev and stage live in one Zerops project, production in a matching one the agent never sees.
Try Zerops in < 5 minutes without installing or forking anything — deploy one of our curated recipes, which are examples covering the full development lifecycle from local dev through staging to production, with built-in seeding, migrations, backups and scaling.
Your favorite language / framework not covered by our recipes? Deploy the Showcase recipe, or join Zerops Discord and we'll help you out.
Production-ready image processing pipeline showcasing distributed architecture on Zerops — a Bun + React frontend with real-time WebSocket updates and live architecture visualization, a Python worker for async image processing via NATS, backed by PostgreSQL, Valkey, and S3-compatible object storage.