Post by Florian Forster

Identity is critical infrastructure. Deciding where to host it shouldn't be a guessing game. One of the most frequent questions I get from other founders and CTOs is whether to self-host or use ZITADEL Cloud. There are three successful patterns I see, depending on your organization's maturity and compliance needs: 🔹 SaaS (ZITADEL Cloud): For teams that want a multi tenant Identity solution to disappear into the background so they can focus on product. 🔹 Private Cloud (BYOC): When Data Residency matters, but you still want managed building blocks. Leveraging existing investments in AWS/Azure/GCP reduces TCO while maintaining sovereignty. 🔹 Full Self-Hosted: When you must own the environment. Unlike legacy providers, our Go API + NextJS architecture makes this highly resource-efficient, but you must accept the operational price. I’ve published a guide detailing the architecture requirements for each path—specifically why I recommend container orchestration (Kubernetes) over simple containerization for production workloads. Read my full guide here https://lnkd.in/gDSeVViZ #IdentityManagement #CloudArchitecture #OpenSource #DevSecOps #DataSovereignty