Cluster, server, route, inbound — who's who

Four words will keep coming up in the CreateYourVPN panel: cluster, server, route, and inbound. They sound dry, but behind them is a very simple system. Let's walk through it once with an example, and the rest of the course will be an easy read.

Picture an office complex

Imagine your VPN is an office complex, and your users are the visitors.

• The cluster is the complex itself: one managed system with its own administration.
• The servers are the buildings. One building is the administration office (the master), the rest are the working buildings that serve visitors.
• The inbounds are the entrance doors of the working buildings. A single building can have several doors, each configured differently.
• The routes are the signs in the lobby: "Meeting rooms — this way", "Coworking — that way". A visitor sees the sign, but which exact door they're taken to is decided by the system, based on where it's least crowded right now.

Now the same thing, but in the panel's own words.

Cluster — a team of servers

A cluster is a group of your servers working as one unit. Every cluster has:

• a master (management node) — the server that stores the user database and "conducts" the others;
• worker nodes — the servers that carry your users' traffic.

Even a single, solitary server is already a cluster: its master and worker node simply live on the same machine. Clusters are covered in detail in the next lesson.

Server — the machine you connected

A server is a specific VPS you rented from a hosting provider and connected to CreateYourVPN. In a cluster, each server plays the role of master, worker node, or both at once. A server has metrics: how many people are online on it, how much traffic it's pushing, how loaded its CPU is. All of that is in the lesson on servers.

Inbound — an entry point on a server

An inbound is a configured entry point into the VPN on a specific worker node: which website the traffic disguises itself as, whether to block torrents, which traffic goes through the VPN and which goes direct (split tunneling).

One server can host several inbounds with different settings — like several doors in one building: one regular, another "no torrents", a third that only sends blocked sites through the VPN. Details are in the lesson on inbounds.

Route — what the user sees

A route is a group of inbounds under one name in the client's subscription. The user sees a route as a single entry in the list — say, "🇺🇸 USA" — while inside that route there can be ten inbounds on different servers. Who gets sent where is up to the system: each user is given the least-loaded option.

That's load balancing — it has its own lesson on routes.

The whole picture

Cluster "Europe"
├── Master (management node) — user database, management
├── Server FRA-1 (node)
│   ├── Inbound "🇩🇪 Germany"
│   └── Inbound "🇩🇪 Germany · streaming"
└── Server HEL-1 (node)
    └── Inbound "🇫🇮 Finland"

Cluster routes:
├── "🇪🇺 Europe"      → pool: "🇩🇪 Germany", "🇫🇮 Finland"
└── "🎬 Streaming"   → pool: "🇩🇪 Germany · streaming"

In the app, the user will see two "servers": "🇪🇺 Europe" and "🎬 Streaming". Connecting to "Europe", they'll land on Germany or Finland — whichever is less busy at the moment.

Remember

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