BYOC ownership boundaries: databases, EKS/Karpenter, and volumes
Last updated: October 2, 2026
Overview
BYOC (bring your own cloud) splits ownership between LangChain and the customer across the data plane. The general rule: resources LangChain provisions and manages require going through LangChain for changes. Resources the customer creates and owns stay under customer control. LangChain does not modify an asset it did not create, and will make changes to assets it does manage on the customer's behalf when asked.
This applies to three areas that come up often: databases, the EKS cluster and its node pools, and volume/mount configuration for agent deployments.
Databases
For LangSmith itself, LangChain provisions the databases (RDS for relational workloads, ElastiCache for caching) as part of the BYOC data plane. There is no option to bring your own database for LangSmith.
For LangGraph Platform agent deployments, bring-your-own-database is a supported configuration. Agents can be pointed at a customer-managed database instead of the one LangChain provisions.
EKS cluster and Karpenter node management
The EKS cluster is mostly managed by LangChain. LangChain provisions the cluster, a system node group for platform workloads, and application node groups via Karpenter with autoscaling. LangChain also handles cluster and node-group upgrades and scaling.
Agents run against a default Karpenter node pool and node class. If you need a custom node class or other node-pool configuration (for example GPU nodes or a different instance family), LangChain works with you to make that change. It isn't self-service, since the cluster and its managed add-ons are resources LangChain owns.
Volume and mount customization
Agent API parity with self-hosted means you can bind volumes to agents via the same API calls you'd use in a self-hosted deployment.
For data-plane-wide needs, such as a volume or mount that should be attached to all agents, LangChain can add that configuration to your data plane config on your behalf.
This follows the same ownership principle as the rest of BYOC: LangChain won't touch or modify an asset it didn't create, and if you need a change to an asset LangChain created and manages, LangChain makes that change for you rather than you editing it directly.