Applied AI Engineer - Full-Stack

BYOC: Pinecone vector database managed service expands to AWS, Azure & GCP. Chris Mellor STORAGE EDITOR Blocks & Files editor Published thu 24 Sep 2026 // 12:12 UTC Vector database-as-a-Service supplier Pinecone has released its proprietary cloud lock by adding support for the AWS, Azure and Google clouds, and is aiming to head fully into the on-prem world. A vector database stores the mathematically transformed tokens generated by a user's natural language input to a large language model (LLM). Pinecone provides a managed vector database service to store, access and use these vectors. Its bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) strategy has a customer's vector data - the data plane - living in their public cloud area but still managed through the Pinecone control plane for operations such as resource lifecycle, authentication, and service health. This control plane does not store or process customer content or request payloads. The public cloud data plane stores, processes, and serves customer data and knowledge. AI agents and applications connect directly to this for read and write operations. The only data shared with Pinecone are anonymized operational metrics and traces for monitoring and support. With BYOC, the data plane runs inside the customer's selected cloud account and region, including those beyond where Pinecone's standard service is available. Vectors, documents, metadata, and request payloads remain within the customer-controlled boundary. Customers retain access to Pinecone's support and engineering teams for troubleshooting, incident response, and ongoing operational guidance. Pinecone does not require SSH, VPN, inbound network access, or a standing cross-account IAM role to manage the service. Upgrades, scaling actions, and maintenance work are retrieved using an outbound call from the Pinecone control plane and executed locally. This allows Pinecone to manage the database without a persistent access path into the customer environment. BYOC works alongside SSO, RBAC, SCIM + SAML, audit logging, encryption, and private-networking controls available with Pinecone's Enterprise plan so customers can have complete confidence in ensuring their proprietary knowledge is secure. Customer admin teams use the same Pinecone APIs, SDKs, and control plane workflows across the BYOC and standard deployments. This means each workload can use the deployment model that fits its data governance and access requirements without creating a separate development path. Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) was one of Pinecone's first BYOC customers to deploy it in production. TMNA used Pinecone to this way with its decades of proprietary manufacturing knowledge kept secure inside Toyota's environment and not exposed to Pinecone's own managed service. Kordel France, Head of AI Engineering at Toyota Motor North America, said: "Decades of manufacturing know-how live in our documentation, and that institutional knowledge is one of the most valuable assets we have. It also happens to be complex - highly structured engineering data sitting alongside unstructured process documents, across a lot of formats and a lot of different access patterns. Pinecone BYOC runs inside our own environment, so that knowledge never leaves our boundary and is served only to models we've already vetted." Pinecone wants to go further, and work in a customer's on-premises environment. Its developing a fully self-managed option for air-gapped and highly restricted networks where both the control plane and data plane will run inside the customer environment. Bootnote. Pinecone is following its competitors' examples. Zilliz Cloud documents regions on all three providers and offers both SaaS and BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Feature availability can vary by region and plan (for example on-demand compute is not equally available everywhere). Weaviate can be self-hosted, with deployment on Kubernetes on AWS (EKS), Azure (AKS), or GCP (GKE). The managed Weaviate Shared Cloud is available on GCP and AWS (AWS Shared Cloud went GA in US East and Europe Frankfurt). Dedicated/enterprise deployments are described as covering AWS, GCP, and Azure. There is also an Azure Marketplace listing for running Weaviate in a customer Azure tenant. Qdrant supports AWS, Azure, and GCP or your own Hybrid Cloud infrastructure.

Pinecone BYOC: trusted AI knowledge in the customer cloud. Sep 23, 2026 Today, Pinecone is announcing the general availability of Pinecone Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, bringing Pinecone's trusted AI knowledge platform to where enterprise data needs to live. AI becomes transformative when it works with a company's proprietary knowledge. Customer context, policies, and operational history allows its agents to make decisions and carry out work using expertise the business has built over years. Organizations have spent years controlling where sensitive knowledge lives and who can reach it. Providing access to it typically meant managing knowledge infrastructure ranging from inference, document parsing, and vector databases. Platform teams shouldered the burden of tuning and maintaining the system, including keeping retrieval quality and performance stable across a diverse set of AI workloads. With BYOC, customer data and the knowledge derived from it remain in the customer's account, while Pinecone manages the platform operations. This means teams can bring sensitive AI workloads to production without taking on the complexity of operating knowledge infrastructure themselves. The APIs and interfaces remain the same as the managed service, providing organizations with the flexibility to select the right deployment model for each workload based on its security, connectivity, and operational requirements. Keeping proprietary knowledge inside the customer cloud. Pinecone's platform architecture separates the systems that manage the service from those that store and process customer data. * Control Plane: Handles management operations such as resource lifecycle, authentication, and service health. It does not store or process customer content or request payloads. * Data Plane: Stores, processes, and serves customer data and knowledge. AI agents and applications connect directly to this for read and write operations. The only data shared with Pinecone are anonymized operational metrics and traces for monitoring and support. With BYOC, the data plane runs inside the customer's selected cloud account and region, including those beyond where Pinecone's standard service is available. Vectors, documents, metadata, and request payloads remain within the customer-controlled boundary. Zero-access BYOC model. Pinecone does not require SSH, VPN, inbound network access, or a standing cross-account IAM role to manage the service. Upgrades, scaling actions, and maintenance work are retrieved using an outbound call from the Pinecone control plane and executed locally. This pull-based mechanism allows Pinecone to manage the database without a persistent access path into the customer environment. Additionally, BYOC works alongside SSO, RBAC, SCIM + SAML, audit logging, encryption, and private-networking controls available with Pinecone's Enterprise plan so customers can have complete confidence in ensuring their proprietary knowledge is secure. Keep the managed Pinecone experience. In addition to Pinecone handling upgrades, scaling, maintenance, and service health monitoring, customers retain access to Pinecone's support and engineering teams for troubleshooting, incident response, and ongoing operational guidance. Teams use the same Pinecone APIs, SDKs, and control plane workflows across the BYOC and standard deployments. This means each workload can use the deployment model that fits its data governance and access requirements without creating a separate development path. Toyota brings manufacturing knowledge to AI within its environment. Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) was one of Pinecone's first BYOC customers. TMNA used Pinecone to ground AI applications with decades of proprietary manufacturing knowledge while keeping that knowledge secure inside Toyota's environment. "Decades of engineering expertise and R&D knowledge live across our technical documentation, specifications, test data, and research. R&D GPT, backed by Pinecone's vector database, helps bring that institutional knowledge together, giving our engineers a faster and more intuitive way to discover, connect, and apply the information they need while maintaining the security, governance, and access controls our enterprise requires. It helps our teams spend less time searching for knowledge and more time applying it to accelerate innovation." - Ravi Chandu Ummadisetti, Head of Agentic AI & Product Research, Toyota Motor North America "A vast amount of our manufacturing know-how lives in our documentation, and that institutional knowledge is one of the most valuable assets we have. It also happens to be complex - highly structured engineering data sitting alongside unstructured process documents, across a lot of formats and a lot of different access patterns. Pinecone BYOC runs inside our own environment, so that knowledge never leaves our boundary and is served only to models we've already vetted. It handles that complexity at the scale our operations demand, with the enterprise security and governance controls our teams require. A critical requirement for how our team can use AI with confidence." - Kordel France, Head of AI Engineering, Toyota Motor North America Bringing trusted AI knowledge to more environments. Its mission is to make AI knowledgeable, everywhere. BYOC extends Pinecone's trusted AI knowledge platform to customer-controlled cloud environments today, and its work continues beyond BYOC. Pinecone is developing a fully self-managed option for air-gapped and highly restricted networks where both the control plane and data plane will run inside the customer environment. Reach out if you're interested in shaping the security and deployment requirements of a self-managed Pinecone offering. Get started. Talk with your Pinecone account team to review your requirements and plan your BYOC deployment, or contact Pinecone to get connected with Pinecone.