Quick Start
This guide takes you from an empty Fractal Cloud account to a running Live System — real infrastructure provisioned in your own cloud account.
There are two ways to get there, and they produce the same result. Pick the one that matches how your team works; you do not need to read both.
Dashboard (UI)
Click through the Fractal Cloud dashboard: connect a cloud account, compose a Fractal on the Design Canvas, instantiate it. Nothing to install.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Author your Fractal and Live System in TypeScript, Java, or Terraform, commit it, and deploy it from your workstation or a CI/CD pipeline.
Which path should I take?
| Dashboard (UI) | Infrastructure as Code | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | First look, evaluating, exploring the catalogue | Repeatable setups, code review, GitOps, CI/CD |
| You need | A browser | A browser once, then Node.js 18+ (or Java / Terraform) |
| Fractals are | Composed visually on the Design Canvas | Authored as code and versioned in Git |
| Runs from | The dashboard | Your workstation or a pipeline |
Both paths are complete and standalone. You can also mix them: environments initialized in the UI are deployable from code, and Fractals authored in code appear in the dashboard catalogue.
Prerequisites
Both paths need the same two things:
- A Fractal Cloud account — log in or register.
- A cloud account you can administer — an AWS account, Azure subscription, or GCP project, with billing enabled. You need administrator-level access in it once, to authorize the Cloud Agent.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Hetzner, IONOS, Aruba, and on-premises Custom Agent deployments are available to enterprise customers only. The steps are the same; contact us to have them enabled.
What you will build
The smallest thing that proves the platform works end to end: one Fractal containing one storage component, instantiated as one Live System in your own cloud account.
That is deliberately small. Once it is running, the same three moves — author a Fractal, select offers, instantiate — scale to a full architecture without changing shape.
The four things you will touch
You will meet these four concepts on either path. Concepts covers them in full; this is enough to follow the quick start.
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Bounded Context | The governance scope that owns your Fractals, Live Systems, and environments — usually one per team or product. |
| Environment | Where infrastructure is provisioned. Maps to a real cloud account, subscription, or project, and hosts the Cloud Agent. |
| Fractal | The reusable blueprint: which components exist and how they relate. Authored once, instantiated many times. |
| Live System | Your running instantiation of a Fractal — one concrete offer selected per component, deployed into an environment. |
The Fractal Cloud API still calls a Bounded Context a Resource Group, so you will see that name in API payloads and in some dashboard fields. It is the same thing.
After the quick start
- Tutorials — the same journey at full length, building a three-tier stack (Kubernetes cluster + PostgreSQL + web app) and covering the Ops / Platform / Developer split.
- Component Reference — every offer in the catalogue and every parameter it accepts, per cloud vendor.
- How-Tos — task-sized recipes: initialize an environment, create a Kubernetes workload, import existing resources, export to Terraform.
If you get stuck, contact us.