Restate Cloud BYOC is designed around three principles: least privilege, no standing access to your cloud account, and customer ownership of infrastructure. Restate never holds your cloud provider credentials; management access is limited to your managed Kubernetes API endpoint via a scoped, revocable token.
Control channel
The BYOC deployment has three network connections, all initiated from within your account:
| Connection | Direction | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|
| Deployment agent → Restate control plane | Egress from your account | HTTPS (long-polling) | Pulls provisioning and management jobs |
| Restate control plane → Kubernetes API | Inbound to cluster API endpoint | HTTPS with bearer token | Manages Restate environments (CRDs, namespaces) |
| Metrics collector → Restate metrics store | Egress from your account | HTTPS | Ships operational metrics for monitoring and alerting |
The token can manage RestateCluster resources and namespaces, and write the in-cluster signing-key Secrets it provisions — but it cannot read existing Secrets in your cluster. Revoking the token disables management while leaving running environments untouched.
What crosses the control channel
Sent to your cluster:
| Category | Examples |
|---|
| Environment manifests | RestateCluster CRDs specifying resource limits, replicas, configuration |
| Container image references | Image tags (pulled from registry by cluster, not transferred over control channel) |
| Configuration | Restate server configuration (non-sensitive) |
| Signing keys | Public keys for request authentication (stored as Kubernetes Secrets in-cluster) |
| Category | Examples |
|---|
| Health status | Pod readiness, cluster status |
| Resource metrics | CPU/memory usage, storage utilization |
| Environment metadata | Version info, replica count |
- Customer application data or invocation payloads
- State stored in Restate
- Customer secrets or credentials
- Application logs (retained in your account)
Bootstrap security
The foundation template is a standard CloudFormation stack (AWS) or ARM template (Azure) that you deploy yourself. It creates scoped roles for the deployment agent.
The CloudFormation template creates an IAM role for the deployment agent with the following permissions, scoped to the install’s resources:| Permission | Scope | Purpose |
|---|
| Resource management | Install resources | Create and manage EKS, VPC, S3, and supporting resources |
| EKS cluster admin | Install’s EKS cluster | Deploy Helm charts and Kubernetes manifests via the Kubernetes API |
| Resource provider registration | Subscription (AWS account) | Register required AWS service providers |
The ARM template creates a managed identity for the deployment agent (a Virtual Machine Scale Set) with the following role assignments:| Role | Scope | Purpose |
|---|
| Contributor | Resource group | Create and manage AKS, VNet, storage, and supporting resources |
| Role Based Access Control Administrator | Resource group | Create downstream role assignments (Key Vault access, network, DNS) |
| Azure Kubernetes Service RBAC Cluster Admin | Resource group | Deploy Helm charts and Kubernetes manifests via Azure RBAC |
| Custom: resource provider registration | Subscription | Register required Azure resource providers (*/register/action only) |
| Downstream role | Assigned to | Purpose |
|---|
| Key Vault Secrets User | AKS Secrets Store CSI driver | Mount the Restate region secret key from Key Vault into pods |
| Network Contributor | AKS cluster identity | Manage load balancers and network resources |
| DNS Zone Contributor | cert-manager identity | Create DNS records for TLS certificate validation |
*/register/action.“Role Based Access Control Administrator” is narrower than “Owner” — it can only manage role assignments, not create or delete resources. It is the minimum privilege required to create the downstream assignments listed above.
Infrastructure security
Compute
Kubernetes clusters run on dedicated cloud-managed virtual machines:
| Layer | AWS | Azure |
|---|
| Compute | EC2 instances (Nitro hypervisor) | Azure VMs (Hyper-V isolated) |
| Container runtime | containerd | containerd |
| Kubernetes | Amazon EKS (managed control plane) | Azure AKS (managed control plane) |
| Architecture | ARM64 (Graviton / Ampere) | ARM64 (Ampere) |
Patching
| Component | Method | Cadence |
|---|
| Node OS | Automated drift detection | Promptly after a new AMI/image is released |
| Kubernetes | Managed cloud provider upgrades | Per provider schedule, coordinated with customer |
| Restate components | Rolling deployment | As releases are published |
| Container images | Image updates | As vulnerabilities are patched |
Network isolation
Each BYOC deployment runs in its own VPC with private subnets across multiple availability zones. Restate environments are isolated via Kubernetes NetworkPolicies:
- Ingress: only the ingress proxy and metrics collector can reach environment pods
- Egress: DNS, peer nodes in the same namespace, allowlisted VPC endpoints, tunnel, and the public internet
- Cross-namespace: blocked by default
All in-cluster traffic between components is encrypted with mTLS via a service mesh.
Service connectivity
Restate environments invoke your service handlers over HTTP. Supported connectivity patterns:
| Pattern | How it works |
|---|
| VPC services | Private IP or internal load balancer via VPC endpoints. All traffic stays within the VPC. |
| FaaS (Lambda) | Invoked via VPC endpoints with IAM authentication. No public internet traversal. |
| Tunnel | For services in other VPCs or networks. Tunnel clients connect to the BYOC VPC via a VPC endpoint. |
Data sovereignty
All customer data remains in your cloud account:
- Invocation payloads, stored state, and snapshots never leave your account
- Application logs are retained in-cluster and accessible to you
- Restate collects only operational metadata (health, resource utilization, environment configuration) for monitoring and management
Audit
| Log type | Location | Retention |
|---|
| Kubernetes audit logs | Your CloudWatch / Azure Monitor | Customer-controlled |
| VPC flow logs | Your S3 / Azure Storage | Customer-controlled |
| Application logs | In-cluster | Customer-controlled |
| Control plane operations | Restate audit trail | Per Restate retention policy |
Customer controls
| Action | Available? | Process |
|---|
| Revoke Restate access | Yes | Remove the Kubernetes bearer token; environments continue running but management is disabled |
| IP-restrict cluster API | Yes | Configure Kubernetes API server allowlist |
| Audit management operations | Yes | Kubernetes audit logs capture all control plane actions |
| Request emergency patching | Yes | File a priority support ticket; Restate SLA applies |
| Force node replacement | Yes | File a support ticket; completed within SLA |
