Your First Live System
You have a new project, a new team, or an empty account. This is how you go from nothing to a real, production-grade cloud environment no configuration files, no manual credentials, no waiting on anyone.
What you'll build
This tutorial is for anyone starting from scratch with Fractal Cloud. It works equally well for a Developer who wants to see something real running, an Engineering Manager setting up a PoC, or a Platform Architect bootstrapping a new environment. In all three cases the goal is to provision a real, governed environment as fast as possible, and understand what just happened. We'll focus on the Web UI. IaC, SDK and CLI workflows will be covered in future tutorials.
The problem
When you start with a new cloud platform, the bottleneck is always the environment itself. On most platforms, getting from "I have an account" to "I have something running" means:🔷 Reading documentation to understand the platform's model;🔷 Configuring cloud credentials manually in multiple places;🔷 Writing or adapting IaC modules;🔷 Waiting for someone with the right permissions to approve the setup.By the time the environment is provisioned, debugged, and handed over, the context has shifted. The PoC loses momentum. The onboarding drags on. What should have been a quick evaluation turns into a multi-week project, and the original goal often gets lost along the way.Fractal Cloud removes these steps. You define what you want. The platform builds it, without manual credential setup, without writing IaC from scratch, and without waiting on approvals that block your progress.
How Fractal Cloud makes this possible
Fractal Cloud introduces a primitive called Fractal, a versioned, reusable infrastructure pattern composed of abstract building blocks. You define the Fractal once in a visual editor, selecting components by infrastructure domain (container platform, message broker, database, workload…) without committing to a specific vendor.When you deploy a Fractal as a Live System, you configure which service each component maps to. The actual cloud resource is resolved at deploy time, based on the connected cloud account and the provider available in the target Environment.Provisioning is handled by the Cloud Agent: a lightweight process running inside your own cloud infrastructure that executes all operations locally, using your own IAM roles and service accounts. The Fractal Cloud Control Plane stores intent, not credentials, and never accesses your infrastructure.Fractal Cloud works across major hyperscalers, local cloud providers, and on-premises. The steps in this tutorial are identical regardless of your target.
The problem
When you start with a new cloud platform, the bottleneck is always the environment itself. On most platforms, getting from "I have an account" to "I have something running" means:🔷 Reading documentation to understand the platform's model;🔷 Configuring cloud credentials manually in multiple places;🔷 Writing or adapting IaC modules;🔷 Waiting for someone with the right permissions to approve the setup.By the time the environment is provisioned, debugged, and handed over, the context has shifted. The PoC loses momentum. The onboarding drags on. What should have been a quick evaluation turns into a multi-week project, and the original goal often gets lost along the way.Fractal Cloud removes these steps. You define what you want. The platform builds it, without manual credential setup, without writing IaC from scratch, and without waiting on approvals that block your progress.
How Fractal Cloud makes this possible
Fractal Cloud introduces a primitive called Fractal, a versioned, reusable infrastructure pattern composed of abstract building blocks. You define the Fractal once in a visual editor, selecting components by infrastructure domain (container platform, message broker, database, workload…) without committing to a specific vendor.When you deploy a Fractal as a Live System, you configure which service each component maps to. The actual cloud resource is resolved at deploy time, based on the connected cloud account and the provider available in the target Environment.Provisioning is handled by the Cloud Agent: a lightweight process running inside your own cloud infrastructure that executes all operations locally, using your own IAM roles and service accounts. The Fractal Cloud Control Plane stores intent, not credentials, and never accesses your infrastructure.Fractal Cloud works across major hyperscalers, local cloud providers, and on-premises. The steps in this tutorial are identical regardless of your target.
What you'll build
A Live System composed of three connected components:🔷 An API Gateway the unified entry point for external traffic;🔷 A Container Platform the runtime that hosts your workloads;🔷 A Custom Workload your application, running on the container platform.The resolution to specific cloud services happens when you deploy, based on the connected cloud account. The Fractal definition stays abstract and reusable.
A Live System composed of three connected components:🔷 An API Gateway the unified entry point for external traffic;🔷 A Container Platform the runtime that hosts your workloads;🔷 A Custom Workload your application, running on the container platform.The resolution to specific cloud services happens when you deploy, based on the connected cloud account. The Fractal definition stays abstract and reusable.
Prerequisites
🔷 An active Fractal Cloud account → Create an account🔷 Access to a cloud account
Create a Resource Group
A Resource Group is the governance boundary in Fractal Cloud. It defines who has access to what and organizes the Fractals and Live Systems that belong to a specific project, team, customer, or business unit.
How you structure Resource Groups depends on how your organization works:🔷 By customer each customer's infrastructure lives in its own Resource Group, with access restricted to the team managing that account;🔷 By business unit each unit governs its own scope, independently;🔷 By environment type a production Resource Group with stricter policies, a development one open for experimentation;🔷 By project short-lived Resource Groups for isolated projects or PoCs.Whatever the scope, the Resource Group is where you set access rules, manage team membership, and define the governance context for everything inside it.To create a Resource Group:1. Log in at dashboard.fractal.cloud2. In the left sidebar, click Resource Groups3. Click Create Resource Group4. Name it: my-first-rg5. Click CreateThe Resource Group is ready immediately.Adding members and teams:Once the Resource Group is created, you can invite individual organization members or entire teams and assign them roles (Admin or View). This gives you fine-grained control over who can manage infrastructure within this scope without touching any other Resource Group.
Create an Environment
An Environment is the bridge between Fractal Cloud and your actual cloud infrastructure. It represents a deployment target for a specific cloud account, project, or cluster where Live Systems will be provisioned.You can associate an Environment with one or more Resource Groups. When you deploy a Fractal as a Live System, you choose which Environment to deploy into.
To create an Environment:1. In the left sidebar, click Environments2. Click the create icon to open the Environment creation form3. Fill in:🔷 Name: my-first-env🔷 Short name: a short identifier (letters and hyphens only)🔷 Select Resource Groups: associate it with my-first-rg4. Click Create EnvironmentThe Environment is created and ready to be connected to your cloud infrastructure.
Initialize the Cloud Agent
To connect Fractal Cloud to your cloud infrastructure, you install the Cloud Agent inside your cloud account. The Agent is a lightweight process that runs entirely within your perimeter, it never exposes credentials to the outside, never requires inbound connections, and uses your own IAM roles and service accounts for all operations.The direction of communication is always outbound from the Agent: it periodically polls the Fractal Cloud Control Plane for the desired state, compares it to the actual state of your infrastructure, and reconciles any differences. No open ports, no VPN, no firewall rules required.
To initialize the Cloud Agent:1. Inside the Environment you just created, scroll to the Cloud Agents section;2. Click Initialize Cloud Agent;3. Authenticate with your cloud provider account using the OAuth flow;4. On the region selection screen, choose the region where the Agent will be installed;5. Click Initialize.Fractal Cloud automatically provisions all the infrastructure needed to run the Agent inside your account. You can follow the progress step by step: enabling required APIs, creating the infrastructure folder, configuring the project, provisioning the network, creating service accounts, and deploying the Agent runtime.When all steps are complete, the Cloud Agent is active and the Environment is ready to receive deployments.What the Agent does continuously: each cycle, the Agent reads the desired state from the Control Plane, reads the actual state from your cloud APIs, diffs the two, and reconciles. Resources are created, updated, or removed as needed. Drift is detected and corrected automatically.
Build a Fractal
A Fractal is a versioned, reusable infrastructure pattern. You compose it in the visual Fractal Builder by selecting components from the Blueprint Components catalog organized by infrastructure domain, and connecting them to express dependencies and data flows.
To create a Fractal:1. In the left sidebar, click Fractals;2. Open the Fractal Builder for a new Fractal;3. On the right side of the canvas, open the Blueprint Components panel;4. Browse components by domain: NetworkAndCompute, Storage, Messaging, APIManagement, CustomWorkloads, Observability, and more;5. Add an API Gateway component to the canvas (domain: APIManagement);6. Add a Container Platform component (domain: NetworkAndCompute);7. Add a Custom Workload component inside the Container Platform this nests the workload within the platform;8. Connect the API Gateway to the Container Platform with a link this expresses that the gateway routes traffic to the container runtime;9. Click the General Information button (top right) to save:🔷 Resource Group: my-first-rg🔷 Fractal Name: my-first-fractal🔷 Version: 1.0🔷 Click Save FractalThe Fractal is now versioned and available to the members of my-first-rg. Anyone with access can instantiate it without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure or write any IaC.Why this abstraction matters: a Fractal defines what is needed, a gateway, a container platform, a workload, not how or where it runs. Those decisions happen at deploy time. The same Fractal can be deployed on any connected infrastructure without changing its definition.
Create a Live System
A Live System is a real, running instance of a Fractal. When you create one, you configure the specific services and parameters for this particular deployment without changing the Fractal itself.
To create a Live System:1. In the left sidebar, click Live Systems;2. Click Create Live System;3. In the dialog, select:Resource Group: my-first-rgFractal: my-first-fractal:1.0Click Next4. The Live System Details panel opens alongside the canvas, which shows the Fractal structure you defined;5. Select the Environment: my-first-env;6. The Infrastructure Provider is detected automatically from the connected cloud account in the Environment. If multiple providers are available, you can choose which one to deploy on, the Fractal stays the same, only the destination changes;7. Enter a Live System Name: my-first-ls.Configuring each component:The Configuration Status panel highlights in yellow the components that require specific parameters for this deployment. For each component:1. Click the component on the canvas to open its Component Configuration panel;2. Select the Service, the delivery model for this component (e.g., Kubernetes for a container platform, Cloud Run Workload for a custom workload);3. Select the Offer, the concrete implementation available on your connected provider;4. Fill in the deployment-specific parameters: region, resource sizing, image, ports, scaling rules;5. Click Save Configuration.Repeat for each component. When all components show a green status, the Live System is fully configured.Instantiating:1. Click Save Draft to preserve the configuration;2. Click Instantiate Live System.The Control Plane sends the desired state to the Cloud Agent. Provisioning begins immediately.Once instantiated, the Live System enters a MUTATING state. On the canvas, each component shows its real-time provisioning status.
What you've done and what it means
You've provisioned a real, governed cloud environment from scratch, using only the UI. More importantly, you've established a pattern:🔷 The Resource Group is your governance scope. Access, policies, and team membership are managed here, not scattered across individuals;🔷 The Environment is your deployment target. It can connect to any supported infrastructure, and you can have as many as you need for different stages or providers;
🔷 The Fractal is the source of truth for what a correct environment looks like. It's versioned, reusable, and provider-agnostic. Anyone in the team can instantiate it;🔷 The Live System is the running instance. It stays reconciled to the Fractal's declared state continuously, automatically.Any future environment created from the same Fractal will be identical in structure, governance, and security posture regardless of who created it or which infrastructure it runs on.
You've provisioned a real, governed cloud environment from scratch, using only the UI. More importantly, you've established a pattern:🔷 The Resource Group is your governance scope. Access, policies, and team membership are managed here, not scattered across individuals;🔷 The Environment is your deployment target. It can connect to any supported infrastructure, and you can have as many as you need for different stages or providers;
🔷 The Fractal is the source of truth for what a correct environment looks like. It's versioned, reusable, and provider-agnostic. Anyone in the team can instantiate it;🔷 The Live System is the running instance. It stays reconciled to the Fractal's declared state continuously, automatically.Any future environment created from the same Fractal will be identical in structure, governance, and security posture regardless of who created it or which infrastructure it runs on.