Glossary
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
A deployment model where the vendor runs its software inside your cloud account, in your AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or DigitalOcean, so you own the infrastructure and the data while the vendor does the operating.
General definition
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) sits between managed SaaS and self-hosting. With SaaS, the vendor owns the account and the customer sends data to it. With self-hosting, the customer owns everything and also carries every operational task. With BYOC the customer provides a cloud account (or a project, subscription or VPC inside one), grants the vendor scoped access, and the vendor deploys, monitors, patches and upgrades the software there. The pattern is common in data infrastructure, streaming, analytics and, increasingly, chat and AI platforms.
- Data stays in an account the customer owns and can revoke access to at any time
- Region and data residency are chosen by the customer, which simplifies GDPR and sector rules
- Cloud spend goes through the customer’s existing billing, committed-use discounts and credits
- The vendor remains responsible for uptime, upgrades and incident response for the software layer
The trade-offs are real. Access must be scoped carefully (a dedicated IAM role, a separate account or subscription, least privilege), responsibilities need to be written down in a shared responsibility matrix, and the vendor needs tooling that works across customer environments rather than one fleet it controls. BYOC deployments are single-tenant by nature, so they cost more to operate than a shared multi-tenant cluster. Private link networking, customer-managed encryption keys and audit logging in the customer’s account are typical requirements from security teams.
BYOC is often what buyers mean when they ask for a private cloud or on-premise deployment but do not want to run the software themselves. It keeps the ownership benefits of self-hosting while keeping the vendor accountable for operations.
In the Ethora ecosystem
Ethora’s dedicated server model is BYOC. Ethora TechOps deploy and operate the platform inside the customer’s own AWS, DigitalOcean or other cloud account (or on-premise), as a single-tenant instance with its own ejabberd chat server, Node.js API layer and MongoDB. The customer owns the account, picks the region and keeps control of the data; Ethora handles installation, monitoring with Grafana and Prometheus, upgrades and support under an SLA. The self-hosted chat server page describes the AWS setup.
This is the deployment most regulated customers choose, because it lines up with a BAA on Enterprise plans, a DPA, EU-only residency where required and a compliance audit trail that can be exported to the customer’s own storage. The AI SDK follows the same pattern: agents can be pointed at self-hosted models through OpenAI-compatible endpoints, so prompts and knowledge never leave the account either. Teams that prefer to operate everything themselves can instead self-host the open-source server with Docker.
