Kubernetes hosting or bring your own cloud? Who owns your infrastructure

A large customer sends an information security questionnaire. Three of its questions: who operates the servers our data sits on? In which data centre? And what happens to the data if you change provider? Anyone running their application with a hoster writes the hoster’s name twice and “migration” for the third. With bring your own cloud the answers look different – and that difference often gets lost when you search for “Kubernetes hosting”.

Bring your own cloud (BYOC) is an operating model in which the platform comes as a software service while the infrastructure – clusters, databases, storage – is created in the customer’s own cloud account and billed from there. That sets it apart from two related models.

What does Kubernetes hosting mean? Three models

1. Classic hosting or PaaS. The provider runs the servers and the platform; you supply code or containers. It owns or rents the hardware, resells compute to you and decides what the platform can do. Convenient, as long as the platform fits.
2. Managed Kubernetes. A cloud provider, Scaleway with Kapsule for example, runs the control plane – API server, etcd, scheduler – and provides the nodes. Everything above that is your job: networking, ingress, certificates, deployments, backups, upgrades.
3. Bring your own cloud. The infrastructure sits in your account as with managed Kubernetes, but a platform sets it up and runs day-to-day operations on top – as software, not as a hoster.

All three go by the label “Kubernetes hosting”. Four questions tell them apart.

Who owns what – and who sends the bill?

• Servers and data. With hosting, both sit with the provider, often in an account you never see. With managed Kubernetes and BYOC, clusters, databases and buckets are created in your project, visible in your cloud provider’s console.
• Contract partner for the infrastructure. With hosting it is the hoster, which in turn contracts with data centres or a cloud; otherwise you sign directly with the cloud provider.
• Billing and mark-up. A hoster buys compute and resells it with a margin, usually in bundles whose purchase price you never see. With managed Kubernetes you pay the cloud provider’s public prices; with BYOC you add a fee for the software – shown separately.
• Location. With hosting the provider determines which regions and subcontractors are on offer. In your own account you choose the region yourself: Scaleway offers Kapsule in Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan (as of October 2026).

A single line item shows the difference: Kapsule’s control plane costs nothing shared and from €80.30 a month with a 99.5% SLA dedicated (as of October 2026). With hosting, that sits inside the bundle price. The full bill is in What does Kubernetes on Scaleway really cost?.

Who takes care of operations, maintenance and upgrades?

Scaleway describes the split for Kapsule in a shared responsibility model: Scaleway runs the control plane and etcd, CoreDNS, CNI and CSI, maintains the node images and offers automatic patch upgrades. Among the things left with the customer:

• the configuration of every Kubernetes resource, RBAC and network policies,
• the size of the node pools and when nodes are upgraded,
• firewall rules, public exposure, TLS certificates, ingress and DNS,
• backup and restore of application data, plus logging and monitoring.

With hosting, the provider does all of that – within its limits, on its schedule. With plain managed Kubernetes you do it yourself, with a platform team or one person on the side. BYOC hands exactly this list to the platform and leaves the ownership with you.

How hard is it to leave?

Lock-in rarely comes from contracts but from data that lives elsewhere.

• Hosting: Changing means migrating: export the databases, copy the files, switch DNS, all in a maintenance window.
• Managed Kubernetes: The cluster is yours. At most you change tools; manifests and scripts stay.
• BYOC: Cancel the platform and only the control layer disappears. Clusters, databases and buckets keep running in your account, and your customers notice nothing. What is missing is the platform’s operations work, which you or another tool take over.

To be fair: BYOC also ties you to the cloud provider. Leaving Scaleway is a migration like any other cloud move.

Hosting or BYOC: which fits when?

Hosting is a good choice when

• you run an application with modest traffic and nobody asks about data centres or subcontractors,
• the platform covers everything the application needs and you need no access to cluster or database servers,
• a fixed bundle price matters more than what is inside it.

BYOC is the better choice when

• customers ask about ownership, location and access and you want to back up the answers yourself,
• infrastructure costs grow with the business and you want to see them at list prices,
• you want Kubernetes but have no platform team to maintain networking, certificates, backups and upgrades,
• changing the platform must never turn into a relocation project.

Plain managed Kubernetes fits when a platform team already exists.

How Clusterward does bring your own cloud

Clusterward is not a hoster; BitKollegen owns no hardware. You create a Scaleway project and store the key of a dedicated IAM application; Clusterward checks its permissions before saving it, encrypted.

The cluster is then created in your project, secure by default: a private network, a public gateway, nodes without a public IP, the API server reachable only from allowed addresses. A run takes six to nine minutes. Every resource carries a tag with the cluster’s id; a teardown removes exactly those and nothing of yours.

Clusterward then takes over the list above: certificates through cert-manager, add-ons on tested versions, backups, monitoring and notifications. Kapsule applies patch versions in a maintenance window you set in the cockpit; Clusterward offers the next minor upgrade and runs it once you confirm. Scaleway bills the resources directly and without mark-up, Clusterward only the platform, by number of clusters – the pricing page shows the tiers. After you cancel, everything keeps running; export your workspace configuration as a JSON file first. More on this under Bring your own cloud and Digital sovereignty.

Conclusion

Kubernetes hosting is an umbrella term for three models that differ in one fundamental respect: who owns the infrastructure – the provider, you along with all the work, or you while a platform runs it. Answer the four questions about ownership, billing, operations and exit first, and you won’t choose by label.

Not sure which model suits your team? Tell us briefly about your application and requirements. We’ll say plainly whether bring your own cloud pays off for you. Ask a question →

Sources and further reading

• Scaleway: Shared responsibility model for Kapsule and Kosmos
• Scaleway: Kubernetes Kapsule pricing
• Scaleway: Product availability by region