While organizations can self-host Dremio on Kubernetes or raw virtual machines (Dremio Software), Dremio Cloud is the fully managed, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of the platform, available natively on AWS and Azure.
The Control Plane vs. Execution Plane
Dremio Cloud operates on a split-plane architecture to maximize security and minimize management overhead:
- The Control Plane: Hosted and entirely managed by Dremio. This layer handles user authentication, the web UI, the Semantic Layer, query parsing, and SQL planning.
- The Execution Plane: This plane runs inside the customer's own cloud environment (e.g., the customer's AWS VPC). When a query needs to process data, the Control Plane spins up temporary compute engines within the Execution Plane. This ensures that the customer's sensitive raw data never leaves their secure network environment.
Key Advantages of Dremio Cloud
Dremio Cloud offers several transformative benefits over self-managed lakehouse deployments:
- Zero Infrastructure Management: Data teams are freed from managing Helm charts, provisioning Kubernetes clusters, upgrading software versions, and troubleshooting node failures. Dremio handles all patching, updates, and uptime natively.
- Infinite, Elastic Scalability: Compute engines automatically spin up to handle high query concurrency during peak business hours and immediately shut down when idle. Organizations pay strictly for the compute they actually consume.
- Integrated Data Governance: Dremio Cloud tightly integrates with cloud-native IAM roles and identity providers, providing a unified Semantic Layer with row and column-level security enforced out of the box.
The Agentic Foundation
As organizations move toward Agentic AI workloads, Dremio Cloud provides the highly available, always-on API endpoints required by autonomous agents. Because the infrastructure scales elastically, an AI agent can execute thousands of exploratory analytical queries without crashing the system or requiring manual provisioning from an administrator.
