BYOC is part of an Enterprise agreement and is set up with our team. It is not something you enable yourself from the dashboard. This page describes how it works and what your cluster needs. To talk through it for your environment, contact us.
BYOC vs Suga Cloud
Prerequisites
- Kubernetes 1.24+ with cluster-admin access
- LoadBalancer support - Cloud provider integration or MetalLB for bare metal
- Default storage class - Must support
ReadWriteOnceaccess mode for volumes - Outbound internet access - To pull container images and connect to Suga API
Suga automatically installs Envoy Gateway (Gateway API) and manages TLS certificates and DNS records during cluster initialization. You don’t need to set these up.
Supported Platforms
GKE, EKS, AKS, self-managed, on-premises, DigitalOcean, Linode, Civo, and other K8s providers.Architecture
- Direct API Connection - Suga connects directly to your Kubernetes API server (no agent installed)
- Encrypted Credentials - Your cluster credentials are stored encrypted in Suga’s database
- Standard K8s API - All operations use the Kubernetes REST API
- Your Infrastructure - Workloads and data run entirely in your cluster
Setup
1
Add BYOC Cluster
Go to Cluster in the left sidebar and connect your cluster.Follow the guided setup to provide your cluster credentials. The UI will walk you through entering your API server URL and authentication details.
2
Verify Connection
After adding, the dashboard should show “Connected” with a green indicator. Suga will automatically initialize the cluster with Envoy Gateway and required components.
Namespaces
Suga creates one namespace per environment, namedsuga- followed by the environment’s ID:
suga-production namespace. Find the ID in the environment’s dashboard URL.
Direct Cluster Access
With BYOC, you have full kubectl access. Set the namespace to the environment you want:Security Considerations
Credential Security
Credential Security
- Use a dedicated ServiceAccount with least-privilege permissions where possible
- Rotate credentials periodically
- Suga stores credentials encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM)
- All API communication is TLS-encrypted
Network Policies
Network Policies
Implement network policies to restrict traffic between namespaces. See Kubernetes documentation for examples.
Pod Security
Pod Security
Apply Pod Security Standards to Suga namespaces:
Secrets
Secrets
Suga stores secrets as Kubernetes Secrets. For enhanced security, use External Secrets Operator with your vault solution or enable Kubernetes encryption at rest.