Bring Your Own Node (BYON)

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Datalayer will publish AWS Marketplace offerings for BYON-enabled deployment patterns soon.

Bring Your Own Node (BYON) lets you attach Kubernetes worker nodes from different environments to the same Clouder-managed platform.

With BYON, a node can come from:

1. Your primary cloud account.
2. Another cloud provider.
3. Edge or on-prem infrastructure.
4. Your local machine (for development and validation scenarios).

Architecture Intent

BYON is designed for heterogeneous capacity:

1. Keep one control-plane and service model.
2. Add compute where it is available or cheapest.
3. Place workloads with labels/taints and scheduling rules.

In practice, Clouder and Kubernetes treat enrolled nodes as part of the same cluster inventory, while operators control placement using standard Kubernetes scheduling primitives.

Typical BYON Flow

1. Prepare the host (container runtime, kubelet dependencies, networking access).
2. Join the host as a Kubernetes node to the target cluster.
3. Label/taint the node to define workload eligibility.
4. Validate node health and schedulability.
5. Route selected workloads to this node class.

Common Use Cases

1. Burst workloads to a second cloud without rebuilding the platform.
2. Add GPU nodes from a specialized environment.
3. Run local or edge nodes for low-latency workloads.
4. Use developer laptops for small-scale test workloads.

Operational Notes

1. Enforce secure connectivity between node networks and the cluster control path.
2. Apply node-level isolation (labels, taints, network policies).
3. Track node provenance and lifecycle in your operations process.
4. Treat laptop nodes as non-production capacity.