A scalable cloud infrastructure serves two or more customers, where each customer is associated with at least one unit of virtual resources. The virtual resources are established by apportioning physical resources in the cloud infrastructure that are partitioned into pods within one or more zones in a scalable manner. Additionally, the cloud infrastructure establishes one or more management server clusters each comprising one or more management servers. The two or more customers create a number of virtual machines within pods in one or more zones. As customers interact primarily with the management server cluster to manage their virtual machine, a state and event handling method is devised to centralize the management of a potentially vast number of customer and supporting system virtual machines.