Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is the vendor-operated pole of self-hosted (see the self-hosted spectrum): fully managed operations inside customer-owned cloud resources. It suits organizations with strict data residency or compliance requirements that need to keep ownership of their cloud infrastructure.

BYOC runs on two independent Distr applications.

The first is an infrastructure application built on the OpenTofu controller, one of the Distr infrastructure controllers. It contains your OpenTofu or Terraform configuration, and the Docker controller runs it on a small management VM in the end customer’s cloud account. It reconciles their infrastructure on a loop and creates the cluster and the resources your product needs. Its cloud credentials and its state stay in the customer’s account.

The second is your application. The Kubernetes controller manages it in the cluster the infrastructure application created.

Both are versioned Distr applications, so an infrastructure change ships like any application update: publish a new version and roll it out. This keeps every managed BYOC customer on the same infrastructure and application versions.

1. Set Up Your Registry
2. Build your infrastructure image on the OpenTofu controller, starting from the aws-eks example
3. Create two Applications: a Docker application for the infrastructure and your own application
4. White-label the Customer portal
5. Onboard your first customer
6. Connect a management VM in the customer’s cloud account with the Docker controller and deploy the infrastructure application to it, passing the customer’s cloud credentials as secrets
7. Connect the Kubernetes controller to the cluster the infrastructure application created and deploy your application to it
8. Manage deployments and updates of both applications directly for the customer using the Distr controllers