> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.abbyy.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Architecture

> Architecture of the ABBYY Vantage cloud service — a multi-tenant platform that processes documents through pools of microservices and scales automatically.

ABBYY Vantage is a multi-tenant cloud service: many tenants are served from a shared, elastically scaled pool of resources. This page is a high-level overview of how the platform is built and how documents move through it. For capacity numbers and scaling behavior, see [Scaling](/vantage/documentation/tenant-admin/architecture/scaling).

## How documents are processed

A Vantage **skill** is a workflow made up of **activities** — such as OCR, classification, and extraction. Each activity runs on its own dedicated pool of **microservices**. As a document moves through the activities of its skill, each activity's microservices pick up the work from a shared queue.

## Multi-tenant, shared-pool model

Processing resources are pooled across the whole system rather than reserved per tenant, so every tenant draws from a larger shared pool. The platform scales automatically at the microservice level: when an activity's queue grows, Vantage adds more microservices for that activity. Built-in overload protection caps any single tenant that persistently overloads the system, so one tenant's spike doesn't degrade the others. See [Scaling](/vantage/documentation/tenant-admin/architecture/scaling) for the limits and the exact behavior under load.

## How documents enter Vantage

Documents reach Vantage through several ingestion paths:

* **Vantage API** — submit files programmatically. See [Getting started with the Vantage API](/vantage/developer/getting-started).
* **SFTP folder** — an agent polls your SFTP folder and submits the files it finds for processing.
* **Mail folder** — an agent collects email messages and creates a transaction for each message body and attachment.

For how these ingestion paths behave under load, see [Scaling](/vantage/documentation/tenant-admin/architecture/scaling#uploading-files-from-an-sftp-or-mail-folder).

## Deployment options

| Option                    | Description                                                                                                                                                    |
| :------------------------ | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Vantage Cloud**         | The multi-tenant SaaS described on this page, hosted and operated by ABBYY.                                                                                    |
| **Vantage Private Cloud** | Deploy Vantage on your own Kubernetes infrastructure for full data residency and compliance control. See [Private Cloud](/vantage/private-cloud/introduction). |

## Related topics

* [Scaling](/vantage/documentation/tenant-admin/architecture/scaling)
* [Introduction](/vantage/private-cloud/introduction)
* [Security](/vantage/documentation/tenant-admin/security/security)