What is bring your own cloud (BYOC)?
Bring your own cloud is a deployment model in which a vendor runs its software on infrastructure the customer owns or rents, instead of on the vendor's shared platform. The customer keeps the machines, the data and the bill; the vendor keeps operating the software.
Written by Paul Madelénat. Last updated
Between SaaS and self-hosting
Software is usually delivered in one of two ways. With SaaS, the vendor runs everything on its own platform and your data lives there. With self-hosting, you run the software yourself and carry all of the operational work. Bring your own cloud sits between them: the software runs in your environment, and the vendor still installs, updates and monitors it.
The term comes from data and developer tooling, where vendors deploy into a customer’s cloud account. The idea is broader than any one provider. What defines BYOC is who owns the infrastructure, not whose datacentre it sits in.
Organisations choose it for three reasons. The data stays in an environment they control and can audit. Spending runs through infrastructure contracts they already hold. And leaving the vendor does not require moving the data, because it never left.
What to check in a BYOC arrangement
BYOC shifts responsibilities, so they need to be written down. Who patches the operating system and who patches the app? Who holds the keys to the machines, and is vendor access logged? Where do backups go? What does the vendor’s control plane receive: health signals only, or application data too? Which law governs the infrastructure provider you bring? A clear shared responsibility model answers each of these before the first machine is set up.
How Pilae applies it
Pilae operates apps on the infrastructure you provide: bare metal, VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V or a Kubernetes cluster you already run. If the machines you want to use are rented from a cloud provider, raise it at onboarding and we scope it with you; our comparisons with AWS and Azure explain how the two approaches differ. Your machines join Pilae’s private network, and the Pilae Agent plans each change, waits for your approval, applies it in your window and records it. The control plane receives health signals and deployment status, and logs stay on the machines that produced them, read on demand from the console.
If you would rather not bring machines, Pilae Cloud provides dedicated ones in any of 12 regions, six of them in Switzerland and the EU, and a hybrid estate mixes both on one network. See on-premises operations for the details.