Lexicon
BYOC
BYOC means Bring Your Own Cloud: vendor managed software running inside your own cloud account. How the model works and why it fits observability data.
Definition
BYOC, Bring Your Own Cloud, is a deployment model where a vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, operated by the vendor but living on infrastructure the customer owns. The data never leaves your environment; the operational burden never arrives.
What it means in observability
BYOC exists because the classic choice was bad on both ends. SaaS means shipping your data to someone else's cloud and paying egress on the way; self hosting means keeping your data but inheriting a platform team's worth of operations. BYOC splits the difference deliberately: the sovereignty, residency, and network locality of self hosting with the managed experience of SaaS. Observability is arguably the model's best fit, because telemetry is simultaneously enormous, expensive to move, and among the most sensitive data an organization produces, full of internal hostnames, user identifiers, and the occasional secret that escaped redaction.
How it works in practice
The architecture splits into two planes. The data plane, ingestion, storage, and query, runs entirely inside your cloud account, so telemetry is stored on your infrastructure in your region under your access controls. The control plane, the vendor's management layer, handles deployment, upgrades, scaling, and health remotely, without taking custody of the data. You grant scoped permissions; the vendor operates the software; the telemetry stays home.
Where it gets hard
Not everything labeled BYOC is the same architecture, and the differences matter: some offerings still route data through vendor infrastructure for processing, which quietly reintroduces the exposure the model exists to remove. The shared responsibility line needs to be explicit, covering who owns capacity, cloud cost, and incident response inside the account. And procurement teams need new muscles, since BYOC costs land partly as cloud spend rather than as one vendor invoice.
Where Tsuga fits
Tsuga is BYOC from the ground up: the platform runs entirely inside your cloud account, telemetry never leaves it, and pricing is flat per GB. Egress costs largely disappear because the data stops traveling.
Related terms
- AWS CloudWatchAmazon CloudWatch is AWS's built in monitoring service: metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards, with tracing through X-Ray, integrated by default with nearly every AWS service.
- Data residencyData residency is the question of where data physically lives: which country or region stores it, and where it is processed along the way.
- Data sovereigntyData sovereignty is the question of whose laws govern your data and who can be compelled to grant access to it.
- Egress costsEgress costs are the fees cloud providers charge for data leaving their network, priced per gigabyte and varying by destination.
- New RelicNew Relic is one of the original APM vendors, now a broad all in one observability SaaS covering APM, infrastructure, logs, browser monitoring, and more, priced on data ingested plus per user seats.
- Vendor lock-inVendor lock-in is the accumulation of switching costs that makes leaving a platform impractical regardless of how the relationship is going: proprietary instrumentation, captive data, workflows that exist in only one tool, and contracts priced to reward staying.