# Getting Started
# Getting Started with Qdrant Managed Cloud

Welcome to Qdrant Managed Cloud! This document contains all the information you need to get started.

## Prerequisites

Before creating a cluster, make sure you have a Qdrant Cloud account. Detailed instructions for signing up can be found in the [Qdrant Cloud Setup](/documentation/cloud-account-setup/index.md) guide. Qdrant Cloud supports granular [role-based access control](/documentation/cloud-rbac/index.md).

You also need to provide [payment details](/documentation/cloud-pricing-payments/index.md). If you have a custom payment agreement, first create your account, then [contact our Support Team](https://support.qdrant.io/) to finalize the setup.

Premium Plan subscribers can enable single sign-on (SSO) for their organizations. To activate SSO, please reach out to the Support Team at [https://support.qdrant.io/](https://support.qdrant.io/) for guidance.

## Cluster Sizing

Before deploying any cluster, consider the resources needed for your specific workload. Our [Capacity Planning guide](/documentation/operations/capacity-planning/index.md) describes how to assess the required CPU, memory, and storage. Additionally, the [Pricing Calculator](https://cloud.qdrant.io/calculator) helps you estimate associated costs based on your projected usage.

## Creating and Managing Clusters

After setting up your account, you can create a Qdrant Cluster by following the steps in [Create a Cluster](/documentation/cloud/create-cluster/index.md).

## Preparing for Production

For a production-ready environment, consider deploying a multi-node Qdrant cluster (at least three nodes) with replication enabled. More details are available in the [Distributed Deployment](/documentation/operations/distributed_deployment/index.md) guide. For more information on how to create a production-ready cluster, see our [Vector Search in Production](/articles/vector-search-production/index.md) article.

If you are looking to optimize costs, you can reduce memory usage through [Quantization](/documentation/manage-data/quantization/index.md) or by [offloading vectors to disk](/documentation/manage-data/storage/index.md#configuring-memmap-storage).

## Infrastructure as Code Automation

Qdrant Cloud can be fully automated using the [Qdrant Cloud API](/documentation/cloud-api/index.md). This allows you to create, manage, and scale clusters programmatically. You can also use our [Terraform Provider](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/qdrant/qdrant-cloud) to automate your Qdrant Cloud infrastructure.