Optimize your cloud data infrastructure spend with Aiven’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

According to Gartner, worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. Given the continued growth in usage of the cloud among large organizations, it is unsurprising that many enterprises take advantage of discount plans such as AWS Savings Plans or Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts to optimize their cloud spend. AWS Savings Plans can provide up to a 72% discount in comparison to On-Demand prices in exchange for a commitment to using their cloud infrastructure services for up to three years.

While these discount plans can save enterprises money, many companies are concerned about the long term commitment and the potential to lose flexibility in the control of their data. This is especially pertinent for companies in regulated industries like healthcare or finance, as there can be strict requirements for the data to stay on infrastructure that they control at all times.

Aiven has always partnered with our customers to help them optimize their cloud spend. More than five years ago, we deployed the first custom account setup, enabling one of our large eCommerce customers to create managed Aiven services directly within their public cloud account. As a result, this customer was able to fulfill their long-term financial commitment with their cloud infrastructure provider, while at the same time having the flexibility and choice to benefit from Aiven’s services, including Apache Kafka®, PostgreSQL® and OpenSearch®.

With the increasing popularity of the custom account setup program, we are now pleased to announce general availability of Aiven’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). BYOC allows customers to deploy Aiven services directly into their own public cloud account - and enjoy the Aiven service experience across all 11 of the open source services that we provide.

"One of the reasons why we moved to Aiven, as opposed to other solutions that we looked at, is that Aiven allowed us to run the services in our own cloud in our own infrastructure” Dups Wijayawardhana, CTO at Supermetrics

How Bring Your Own Cloud works

Aiven’s BYOC connects a customer’s own AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure VPC to the Aiven platform, making it possible to deploy Aiven services directly to their own cloud account. This means that all compute, storage and networking infrastructure services - and associated costs - remain under a customer’s direct control.

The managed Aiven experience is identical to a standard Aiven deployment. The Aiven console, CLI, REST API, and Terraform provision and manage services just as they would normally: tasks like scaling a service up or down and performing a version upgrade are as easy in a BYOC deployment as they are otherwise. Aiven also monitors the health of the services, takes regular backups and provides the same 99.99% uptime SLA and security certifications as with standard Aiven services.

To learn more about how BYOC works and the different options available, please check the documentation.

Here are some frequently asked questions about BYOC, together with their answers, of course:

• How is Aiven prevented from accessing my infrastructure?
  In a BYOC deployment, you create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) dedicated to Aiven services within each region you want to operate. You control the connectivity between this VPC and your other VPCs. Aiven accesses these dedicated VPCs through a proxy in a DMZ for additional security and control.

• How does BYOC help me to meet my compliance requirements?
  In most cases you can meet your regulatory and compliance requirements by utilizing a standard Aiven deployment or Enhanced Compliance Environment. However, if you have special compliance needs, BYOC gives you more control of the data residency and allows you to layer additional security controls on top of Aiven’s existing controls.

• Standard Aiven pricing includes networking cost. How about BYOC? Do I have to pay the networking cost?
  Yes, BYOC customers are responsible for all cloud infrastructure related costs. This includes compute, storage and network traffic charges.

• How can you guarantee SLA when the infrastructure is not directly managed by Aiven?
  The self-healing Aiven platform works the same way in BYOC deployments as in standard Aiven deployments. The Aiven SRE team also manages BYOC deployments the same way, with regular health checks, backups, service maintenance and patching. If downtime is caused by factors outside of Aiven’s reasonable control, this is not taken into account when calculating the Monthly Uptime Percentage

• If Aiven provides a managed service inside my cloud account, what, if any, responsibilities do I have?
  Aiven’s BYOC deployment follows a shared responsibility model. In this model, Aiven and the customer share the responsibility for the availability, security and compliance, and ongoing operation of the solution. Aiven defines the service management and delivery infrastructure, and provides service deployment, management and lifecycle services. We ensure our services are secure and resilient, and we support all services. In a BYOC deployment, you are responsible for setting and managing account and resource permissions, monitoring resource quotas and scalability, maintaining security and compliance of your cloud environment, and ensuring that your services are resilient and tested regularly.

The benefits of Bring Your Own Cloud

BYOC is beneficial for customers who have favorable purchasing agreements for cloud infrastructure, or specific requirements for security and control. For others, the standard Aiven model of deploying services into the Aiven account in the desired cloud and region will generally be the best fit as Aiven takes care of all the costs and complexity of configuring the cloud infrastructure.

Lower total cost of ownership

Depending on the cloud provider, Aiven’s BYOC can unlock the opportunity to use Cost Savings plans, Committed Use Discounts, and several other billing and pricing features that may enable you to save money on compute, networking and storage infrastructure costs. As you aggregate more spend directly with your provider, you may also be able to accelerate your spend and achieve a higher tier of usage, making you eligible for additional enterprise discounts from the hyper-scale cloud provider.

For instance, one of our eCommerce customers wanted to optimize their cloud costs by using AWS Cost Savings Plans for their event streaming platform. However, they were concerned about committing both infrastructure and data streaming to a single vendor. By adopting Aiven for Apache Kafka® and the BYOC deployment model, they were able to achieve 20% cost savings while retaining flexibility and maintaining control over their data.

Keeping your data under your control

"Aiven allowed us to keep control of our data, while enjoying the benefits of a managed service" Diogo Gomes, Cloud Transformation & Database Manager at La Redoute

With BYOC, your data always stays in your own cloud infrastructure, but you don’t need to worry about managing and keeping the data infrastructure up and running. You can layer additional security controls, specific to your region or industry within the cloud provider, on top of Aiven’s existing security controls and compliance standards.

An Aiven customer in the financial sector was certain they would have to self-manage their data infrastructure to be compliant with regulations. After a careful evaluation of the BYOC deployment model and security features, they were happy to find that they could enjoy the benefits of a managed service while keeping the necessary control of their data.

Getting started

BYOC deployment option is available to new and existing customers with an enterprise support contract and a minimum monthly spend of $5000. It can be deployed on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms.

If this sounds interesting and you want to learn more, check our "Achieve lower TCO and keep full control of your data with Aiven’s Bring Your Own Cloud" webinar or get in touch with us