Choosing the right infrastructure option is critical to align your business needs, scalability goals, and security and compliance requirements. Cube Cloud is designed to fit, not dictate, your modern data stack architecture and technology choices. The flexibility in infrastructure options allows organizations to tailor their infrastructure to meet specific technical and operational requirements, while optimizing costs.

In this blog, we’ll explore Cube Cloud’s infrastructure options: shared infrastructure, dedicated infrastructure, dedicated infrastructure with customer-supplied pre-aggregation storage (CSPS), and bring your own cloud (BYOC) to help you choose the right configuration.

Shared Infrastructure

With shared infrastructure, Cube provides a fully-managed solution, taking care of everything—hosting, security, scaling, maintenance, and updates. As the most popular infrastructure option, it is ideal for organizations who want to minimize IT overhead and focus on their core competencies.

Shared infrastructure is a cost-effective starting point if you do not have to immediately address security and compliance requirements that are available in dedicated infrastructure. In this scenario, everything is deployed on the Cube Cloud infrastructure in one of our shared VPCs. Cube takes care of creating, scaling, and monitoring your deployments, as well as managing Cube Store and persisting pre-aggregated data. This option requires the least effort to set up and is available on all pricing plans.

Choose shared infrastructure if you are seeking:

  • Ease of Use: With everything managed by Cube, organizations can quickly get up and running without worrying about infrastructure configuration and maintenance.
  • Lower Cost: Control costs with the simplicity of a fully-managed SaaS configuration.
  • Scalability: Cube handles scaling, ensuring performance as user demand increases.

Shared infrastructure may not be for you if you are concerned about:

  • Less Control: Enterprise features, such as VPC peering or PrivateLink and external monitoring integrations are not available on the shared infrastructure.
  • Resource Contention: May occur from when the majority of platform resources are in use, also known as the “noisy neighbor” problem.

Dedicated Infrastructure

Dedicated infrastructure is a great fit for most typical enterprise use cases. With dedicated infrastructure, Cube Cloud is hosted on a dedicated application cluster allocated exclusively to one customer within Cube’s account.

The option offers isolation of managed services. Providing isolated resources, this ensures better performance and additional layers of security. It is available on the Enterprise plan and above.

Choose dedicated infrastructure if you are seeking:

  • Enhanced Performance: Dedicated resources mean more consistent performance without the variability of shared environments.
  • Increased Security: Dedicated environments can be more secure, meeting compliance and regulatory standards.
  • Enterprise Capabilities: Increased SLAs, more features, and more data source connectivity to meet your unique requirements are included in the Enterprise tiers.

Dedicated infrastructure may not be for you if you are concerned about:

  • Higher Costs: Dedicated resources come at a premium compared to shared environments.
  • Data Residency: Having the ability to control where data is stored and processed.

Dedicated Infrastructure with Customer-Supplied Pre-aggregation Storage (CSPS)

Dedicated infrastructure with CSPS combines elements of both Cube-managed and customer-managed resources. Cube manages the application, while the storage components are managed by the customer.

Cube Store is the only component of Cube that is stateful, and it requires an object store to persist pre-aggregated data. In the previous scenarios, storage is provided and managed by Cube Cloud, but with CSPS you get an option to move all the data at-rest to your own bucket for greater security and better compliance.

On the Enterprise Premier plan, organizations can move all data at rest to the customer’s infrastructure. In this scenario, all Cube components reside on the Cube Cloud side. Cube Store uses a customer-provided object store, on the cloud provider of your choice, for reading and persisting pre-aggregated data. This provides additional peace of mind when processing highly critical business or personal information.

Choose dedicated infrastructure with CSPS if you are seeking:

  • Flexibility: Allows organizations to leverage Cube’s expertise for application management while the customer maintains control over sensitive data.
  • Optimized Operations: Potential for operational cost savings by choosing to manage only data at rest within a customer-provided object store, compared to BYOC.
  • Greater Security & Compliance: Ensure data residency, security, and compliance for data at rest, according to your requirements.

Dedicated infrastructure with CSPS may not be for you if you are concerned about:

  • More Complex Integration: Integrating and managing a hybrid environment can be more complex, requiring coordination between the Cube and the customer.
  • Maintenance Overhead: While less than a fully self-managed environment, hybrid models still demand some level of IT involvement from the customer.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

BYOC allows organizations to host Cube Cloud components on their own cloud infrastructure, either on AWS, Azure, or GCP. With BYOC, all the components interacting with private data are deployed on the customer infrastructure. The components are managed by the Cube Cloud Control Plane via the Cube Cloud Operator, which is on Cube’s infrastructure. It is available on the Enterprise Premier plan only.

Choose BYOC if you are seeking:

  • Unmatched Security and Compliance: BYOC environments are the most secure option, meeting stringent compliance and regulatory standards, compared to previous scenarios.
  • Flexibility: Allows for all the components interacting with private data to be deployed on the customer infrastructure.
  • Consolidated Cloud Cost: Potential to optimize costs based on volume of your existing cloud agreements or usage patterns.

BYOC may not be for you if you are concerned about:

  • Technical Expertise Required: Significant in-house expertise needed to operate the infrastructure.
  • Increased Responsibilities: Customers must maintain the underlying kubernetes clusters and other infrastructure components, which can be resource-intensive.

Conclusion

Selecting the right infrastructure option depends on a thorough understanding of your business requirements, IT capabilities, and long-term goals. Fully-managed, shared infrastructure is perfect for those seeking simplicity and reliability, while dedicated infrastructure suits businesses needing more predictable performance and security. Dedicated infrastructure with CSPS combines elements of both Cube-managed and customer-managed resources with data at rest on the customer’s infrastructure. BYOC provides unmatched security and compliance for technically proficient teams.

Carefully evaluating these options will ensure your Cube Cloud deployment aligns with your strategic and operational objectives, delivering on your security and compliance requirements. Contact sales to explore Cube Cloud which infrastructure option is right for your unique requirements.