diff --git a/concepts/cloud-architecture.mdx b/concepts/cloud-architecture.mdx
new file mode 100644
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+---
+title: 'Cloud Architecture'
+description: 'How Morphik Cloud UI and Morphik Core interact in production deployments.'
+---
+
+Morphik Cloud is split into two services that communicate over HTTPS:
+
+- **Morphik Cloud UI**: The control plane that handles users, orgs, billing, and app provisioning.
+- **Morphik Core**: The data plane that stores documents and embeddings, runs ingestion, and serves retrieval and chat.
+
+This separation keeps your application management in the UI while all document data lives in the core API.
+
+## Components at a glance
+
+| Component | Primary role | Typical hosting |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| Cloud UI | Auth, orgs, billing, app metadata, dashboards | Vercel (or your web host) |
+| Morphik Core | Ingestion, storage, retrieval, search, graphs, chat | EC2 or Kubernetes |
+| Embedding GPU (optional) | Multimodal embeddings (ColPali API mode) | Lambda GPU, on-prem GPU |
+| Postgres + pgvector | Documents, embeddings, app isolation | Neon or any Postgres |
+| Object storage | Raw files and chunk payloads | S3 or local disk |
+| Redis + worker | Async ingestion pipeline | Same VPC as core |
+
+## Morphik URI: the contract between UI and Core
+
+When you create an app, Morphik Core returns a Morphik URI:
+
+```
+morphik://<app-name>:<jwt-token>@<host>
+```
+
+The Cloud UI parses this URI, extracts the token, and uses it for API calls:
+
+```
+Authorization: Bearer <jwt-token>
+```
+
+The token contains the `app_id`, and Morphik Core uses that to isolate data per app.
+
+## Provisioning flow (control plane)
+
+App creation is a control-plane operation that provisions an app and returns a Morphik URI.
+
+```mermaid
+sequenceDiagram
+    participant Browser
+    participant UI as Cloud UI
+    participant Core as Morphik Core
+    participant DB as Core Postgres
+
+    Browser->>UI: Create app
+    UI->>Core: POST /cloud/generate_uri
+    Core->>DB: Create app + token
+    Core-->>UI: morphik://... URI
+    UI-->>Browser: App created
+```
+
+In a dedicated-cluster setup, the UI can call the cluster directly (instead of the shared API) and pass an admin secret to mint the URI.
+
+## Runtime flow (data plane)
+
+Once an app exists, the UI talks to Morphik Core directly from the browser. Core verifies the token and scopes all reads and writes by `app_id`.
+
+### Ingestion
+
+```mermaid
+sequenceDiagram
+    participant Browser
+    participant Core as Morphik Core
+    participant Redis
+    participant Worker
+    participant GPU as Embedding API
+    participant DB as Postgres + pgvector
+
+    Browser->>Core: POST /ingest/file (Bearer token)
+    Core->>DB: Create document record
+    Core->>Redis: Enqueue ingestion job
+    Worker->>GPU: Embed (ColPali API mode)
+    Worker->>DB: Store embeddings + metadata
+    Core-->>Browser: Ingest accepted
+```
+
+If you run in local embedding mode, the worker generates embeddings on the core instance instead of calling the external GPU.
+
+### Retrieval and chat
+
+```mermaid
+sequenceDiagram
+    participant Browser
+    participant Core as Morphik Core
+    participant DB as Postgres + pgvector
+
+    Browser->>Core: POST /query or /retrieve/chunks
+    Core->>DB: Vector search scoped by app_id
+    Core-->>Browser: Results and citations
+```
+
+## Agent mode (server-side)
+
+Agent mode runs in a server route (Cloud UI) so it can call your LLM provider securely. The agent uses Morphik Core as a tool:
+
+- The UI calls `/api/agent/chat` on the Cloud UI.
+- The server route calls Morphik Core for retrieval (using the app token).
+- The server route streams the LLM response back to the browser.
+
diff --git a/docs.json b/docs.json
index 6a29e89..86440ea 100644
--- a/docs.json
+++ b/docs.json
@@ -71,6 +71,7 @@
             "group": "Concepts",
             "pages": [
               "concepts/user-folder-scoping",
+              "concepts/cloud-architecture",
               "concepts/colpali",
               "concepts/knowledge-graphs",
               "concepts/metadata-filtering"