AWS just announced a new lower-latency S3 storage class and for those of us in the data infrastructure business, this is big news. It’s not a secret that a low-latency object storage primitive has the potential to change how we build cloud data systems forever. So has this new world arrived with S3 Express One Zone?

The answer is no, but this is a good time to talk about cloud object storage, its role in modern cloud data systems and the potential future role it can take.

My job at Confluent involves a mixture of research, engineering and helping us figure out the best technical strategy to follow. BYOC is something I’ve been thinking about recently so I decided to write down the thoughts I have on it and where I think cloud services are going in general.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a deployment model which sits somewhere between a SaaS cloud service and an on-premise deployment. The vendor deploys their software in a VPC in the customer account but manages most of the administration for the customer. It’s not a new idea, the term Managed Service Provider (MSP) has been around since the 90s, and refers to the general term of outsourcing management and operations of IT infrastructure deployed within customer or third-party data centers.