> I'm actually really interested in hearing about a large enterprise running vendor code that would even entertain the idea the vendor could automatically update the entire deployment without their direct involvement.
A better word than "involvement" is "knowledge." We operate BYOC installations of managed ClickHouse and allow customers to pick upgrade windows. It's not that different from doing upgrades yourself. It's also important to remember that SaaS products upgrade without user intervention and often without user knowledge. That's one of the characteristics of the SaaS model.
> I think the most important aspect here though, and the most subtle one, is the issue of deployment and operational complexity. For BYOC to work well, the vendor really should be designing for it from the beginning.
This is definitely correct. We made a design decision early on that environments for managed databases (i.e., the data plane) are dedicated Kubernetes clusters for each tenant. Data plane services fit in the single K8s cluster and can be installed in 20 minutes or less over the network.
The Omnistrate article makes a great point that there are different flavors of BYOC depending on how much control users want. We have two variants: (a) fully managed stack in its own VPC where we install and run everything and (b) managed databases on user-supplied Kubernetes.
A better word than "involvement" is "knowledge." We operate BYOC installations of managed ClickHouse and allow customers to pick upgrade windows. It's not that different from doing upgrades yourself. It's also important to remember that SaaS products upgrade without user intervention and often without user knowledge. That's one of the characteristics of the SaaS model.
> I think the most important aspect here though, and the most subtle one, is the issue of deployment and operational complexity. For BYOC to work well, the vendor really should be designing for it from the beginning.
This is definitely correct. We made a design decision early on that environments for managed databases (i.e., the data plane) are dedicated Kubernetes clusters for each tenant. Data plane services fit in the single K8s cluster and can be installed in 20 minutes or less over the network.
The Omnistrate article makes a great point that there are different flavors of BYOC depending on how much control users want. We have two variants: (a) fully managed stack in its own VPC where we install and run everything and (b) managed databases on user-supplied Kubernetes.