Lifecycle model and glossary

For administrators, engineering managers, engineers, security and compliance 4 min read

The five pillars, the seven steps of an engineer's journey inside them, and the terms used across ELOS.

Five pillars, seven steps

Five pillars are what ELOS runs: every capability belongs to exactly one. Seven steps are what an engineer goes through inside them. Grow holds three steps (Understand, Enable, Contribute) because becoming productive is where most of a new engineer's first months go.

Step	Pillar	In one line
1 · Join	Join	A day-one plan and the access the role needs
2 · Understand	Grow	Context, owners and cited answers
3 · Enable	Grow	Tools connected, access routed to approvers
4 · Contribute	Grow	Readiness through to engineering-ready
5 · Operate	Operate	Time-bound access and a full audit trail
6 · Transfer	Transfer	Role changes, handovers and successors
7 · Preserve	Preserve	Knowledge that stays when people move on

Terms

Term	Meaning
Workspace	Your organization's private, isolated home in ELOS.
Access role	The role ELOS enforces for a member. It overrides the role asserted at sign-in.
Read scope	Limits what a custom role can see, by owning team, service tier or service.
Grant	Approved access to one resource at one level. Always time-bound; revoked automatically when it expires.
Access bundle	The set of access a role needs on day one, requested in one step.
Elevation	A temporary local-admin grant to install or update a tool.
Access review	A check of every active grant, where a reviewer keeps or revokes each one.
Knowledge journey	A staged path from project context to engineering-ready.
Readiness	Whether an engineer is ready, decided by mandatory gates rather than an average.
Orphan	A service with no current owner.
Knowledge footprint	What a departing person owned and who succeeds them, kept as organizational memory.
Draft	An action Ask ELOS proposes. A person must confirm it, and normal approvals apply.
Service account	A machine identity for automation, with a role and an API key.