This tutorial was originally published on IBM Developer by Zack Grossbart

Understanding how the cloud works is key to building stable and reliable cloud applications. Should you keep all your servers in one zone or spread them out? What causes capacity errors, and how do you fix them? Where is your workload actually running and what happens if that server fails? How do you ensure it's running on something stable?

To design secure and resilient applications, you need to answer these questions. Knowing how a server becomes part of the cloud and how IBM monitors, detects issues, and fixes them is essential to trusting your workloads with us.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes to bring a new server into the cloud, this article is for you.

Cloud resiliency and scale come from more than just stacking servers in a room. It takes careful planning, smart design, and coordination of both physical and logical components.

The IBM Cloud is always evolving. We’re constantly adding capacity, launching new features, fixing servers, and upgrading infrastructure to give our customers the best experience possible.

Bringing a new server into the cloud involves a lot of moving parts—from configuration and power to networking and placement. In this article, we’ll walk you through how IBM adds new servers to the VPC cloud: where they live, how they’re set up, how they’re connected, and how they become a trusted part of the IBM Cloud.

Building blocks of a Cloud

To understand how a cloud works, we need to look at the two main components that make it all possible:

• Physical components: The actual hardware and infrastructure.

• Logical components: The software and systems that organize and manage that hardware.

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