INTERVIEW Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a concept gaining traction as companies seek ways to resolve sovereignty and privacy issues, but its implementation can vary widely depending on interpretation.
Bring Your Own This, Bring Your Own That. Enterprises are being sold concepts that allow them to bring their own resources to a vendor’s party, potentially cutting costs, addressing data sovereignty concerns, enhancing security, or a combination of all three.
However, Tom Wilkie, CTO of observability outfit Grafana Labs, reckons that companies need to exercise some caution and understand exactly what they are getting into before turning up at a vendor’s doorstep with their cloud in tow.
Grafana’s approach is to treat the customer’s cloud resource as just another region for Grafana’s cloud, although completely isolated (Wilkie is keen on the words ‘blast radius’ for when things go wrong elsewhere). The customer is expected to provide an isolated account for Grafana’s engineers (the company certainly does not want any access to data or resources it doesn’t need) and then leave those engineers to do their thing.
Grafana’s BYOC is aimed squarely at organizations that have passed the point where the company’s SaaS offering plateaus in terms of discounts but don’t want the hassle of setting up the open-source option themselves and building all the intricate components that a paid subscription to Grafana Cloud would provide.
Enter Bring Your Own Cloud and a license, which Wilkie tells us can run into “millions of dollars a year.”
“They [the customers] pick up the infrastructure cost, the platform cost… we run it on their dime, but we’re the ones operating it. We upgrade it, we patch it, we’re on call for it, we’re defending the SLO, we’re scaling it, we’re deploying new features. To us, this is any other Grafana Cloud region.”
BYOC is therefore not for the faint of heart. “A lot of customers,” says Wilkie, “are treating this like buying enterprise software.” It’s more like SaaS. Wilkie gives an example: “If you start saying ‘Okay, well, I need to install my own security agent on every single one of the machines in this country…’ No. I’m sorry, that will mess with our ability to run our software the way we do. That will make your account a special snowflake, and that’s just a hard ‘no’ from me.
“So, as a buyer, as a customer, you have to think about this in the same way you think about SaaS, just with a different economic model.”
The overheads involved in running what is, for all intents and purposes, a Grafana Cloud region on the customer’s own resources can be epic, which is why the company’s take of BYOC attracts such a high price tag.
Other interpretations of BYOC are less expensive but, according to Wilkie, miss the point. “There’s a breed of companies,” he says, “saying ‘We’ll help package up your software and deploy it’ … it’s not solving a problem I have!”
Wilkie gives another example from another BYOC company: “We give the customer an agent to deploy. That agent connects back to our servers and then accepts instructions. This way, the customer doesn’t have to give you access to anything for their infrastructure.
“And I’m looking at this, thinking, ‘Is this a joke?’ … because, basically, they’re just downloading shell scripts from a remote endpoint.
BYOC is often trotted out as a solution for compliance or sovereignty issues. Your data, your cloud, right? Wilkie finds the argument confusing. “I don’t understand how BYOC, as I understand it, could solve compliance or sovereignty issues.” He cites the example of Amazon, with an operational team for Amazon China, or Google’s Sovereign Cloud offerings in Europe: “that’s how you solve sovereignty issues”, but BYOC? Not really, not when an (for example) American company needs access to your cloud resource.
Other BYOC providers include WarpStream, owned by Confluent, a company that Wilkie says he thinks “do a really good job.” Warpstream’s BYOC model operates with organizations hosting applications and data in their cloud accounts, and the company states: “A good BYOC solution will support zero-access from the vendor accessing their raw data in their cloud under any circumstances.”
The obvious solution to total sovereignty is to run everything on a private cloud with no external connectivity. Taking Grafana as an example, it is certainly possible to fire up the open source version of its software (and those of competing observability vendors). However, getting access to tools similar to the paid version and, importantly, the necessary skills to run or create those tools can prove both costly and time-consuming. Hence, BYOC is often regarded as a bridge between SaaS, which can often overlook regulatory needs, and full self-hosting.
However, as Wilkie observes, it is essential to understand precisely what a company’s BYOC offering entails. In the case of Grafana, Wilkie is refreshingly open and says, “It [the BYOC option] isn’t designed to solve privacy concerns. It isn’t designed to solve data sovereignty issues.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is ‘how do I give you an option that is more cost-effective than open-source and more cost-effective than SaaS.'” ®
Discussion about this post