Key takeaways
- Keep total control of your data and infrastructure by running fully managed MariaDB databases directly within your own Azure account and VPC.
- Maximize your cloud budget by applying existing provider credits, savings plans, and negotiated discounts to your database infrastructure costs.
- Eliminate manual maintenance while meeting strict security and compliance standards, as MariaDB handles the operations without your data ever leaving your environment.
- Bridge the gap between the simplicity of a managed service and the rigorous governance requirements of enterprise-scale platform and FinOps teams.
Since the original publication of this post, Bring Your Own Account (BYOA) for MariaDB Cloud is now also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The core benefits of BYOA discussed below now apply to both Azure and AWS environments.
The Evolution of Cloud Databases
The shift to cloud databases fundamentally changed how we run production environments. By offloading the burden of hardware management, software patching, and 24×7 operations, organizations gained instant scale, built-in resilience, and a consumption-based cost model. For many teams, this operational simplicity was the primary catalyst for cloud migration.
However, as workloads grow more complex and cloud environments mature, that “managed” simplicity can introduce a hidden tax. Traditional DBaaS models often create an abstraction of the data plane – limiting visibility into the underlying infrastructure, constraining networking controls, and requiring databases to reside within a provider-managed account. For enterprises with strict data residency requirements or tightly governed environments, this lack of granular control isn’t just a nuisance – it’s a blocker.
Introducing Bring Your Own Account
We believe you shouldn’t have to choose between the automation of a managed service and the integrity of your own cloud architecture. What if your database could run inside your own account – billed to your commitments and governed by your policies – without sacrificing operational excellence?
Today, we are excited to announce the Technical Preview of “Bring Your Own Account” (BYOA) for MariaDB Cloud on Microsoft Azure. This model provides the best of both worlds: the simplicity of a fully managed service for operations, reliability and lifecycle management with the full control of a customer-owned environment.
With BYOA, your MariaDB Cloud databases run entirely inside your own cloud account, while the MariaDB Cloud control plane manages them remotely.
Here’s what that means in practice:
- Your cloud account owns the data plane
Compute, storage, networking and backups all live in your cloud account and VPC. - MariaDB Cloud manages the database lifecycle
Provisioning, scaling, backups, patching, monitoring and failover are still fully managed by MariaDB Cloud. - No customer data leaves your account
The control plane orchestrates operations using secure, short-lived identities but never accesses your data.
This deployment model addresses three primary requirements we consistently hear from our larger-scale users:
- Data sovereignty & security: Because the database runs in your Azure tenant, you can enforce your existing security policies, IAM roles and routing policies. Your data never leaves your environment.
- Cloud spend optimization: All infrastructure costs incurred by the database are billed directly to your cloud account. This allows you to utilize your existing Commitments and benefit from any negotiated volume discounts you already have in place.
- Operational consistency: You get the benefits of a managed service – avoiding the “toil” of manual database administration – without losing visibility into the underlying infrastructure.
Why this matters to your stakeholders:
- Platform teams: BYOA allows you to enforce standardization by integrating MariaDB Cloud directly into your VPC architectures, IAM policies and logging pipelines.
- Security and compliance: Data remains within your security perimeter, ensuring strict data residency, auditability and least-privilege access.
- Financial operations: By running MariaDB in your own account, you leverage your existing Azure commitments, savings plans and negotiated discounts automatically.
Microsoft Azure Technical Preview
This initial release is for Microsoft Azure and is available as a Technical Preview. While this focuses on core connectivity, provisioning and lifecycle management, we will introduce an expanded set of management and optimization features as the service moves toward General Availability (GA). We are also actively developing BYOA options for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which will be available soon.
Join the Technical Preview
We are inviting Microsoft Azure users to help shape the future of MariaDB Cloud. If you need the simplicity of a fully managed MariaDB service but require the governance of a customer-owned environment, we’d love your feedback.
- Experience BYOA: Join the Tech Preview to get a first look at the deployment workflow and share your insights directly with our product team. Sign up here.
- See it in action: Join our live webinar on March 11 for a deep dive and technical demo of BYOA on Azure. Register for the webinar.
- Go deep: For technical requirements, account prerequisites and architecture details, visit the MariaDB Cloud BYOA documentation.
LIVE WEBINAR: MARCH 11
