BYOC — Bring Your Own Cloud — is a deployment model where a vendor’s managed vector database runs inside your cloud account rather than theirs. You get the convenience of a fully managed service, but the data plane lives in infrastructure you own and control.
This model exists to resolve a tension between convenience and control. A standard managed (SaaS) service is the easiest to adopt, but it means your data leaves your environment and lives on the vendor’s servers — often a non-starter for organisations with strict data residency, compliance, or security requirements. Pure self-hosting keeps everything in-house but reintroduces all the operational burden.
BYOC threads the needle: the vendor’s control plane orchestrates and manages the system, while the actual vectors and queries stay within your cloud account, your network, and your security perimeter. It is increasingly common for enterprise customers who want managed operations without surrendering custody of their data.