Self-Host

Choose self-hosting, BYOW (Bring Your Own Workers), or fully managed BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud).

Self-host vs BYOW vs BYOC

Choose where your control plane and workers run, and who manages them.

Self-host

You run and maintain the workers, control plane, and storage. Choose this when you need to operate the stack yourself, including fully air-gapped deployments.

BYOW (Bring Your Own Workers)

You run your workers on your infrastructure. Rivet Cloud hosts and manages the control plane and storage, so you only maintain your application code and worker infrastructure.

See worker deployment options and manage your project in the Rivet dashboard.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)

Rivet Enterprise Edition and FoundationDB run inside your VPC, fully managed by Rivet. An operator in your cluster pulls deployment instructions from Rivet Cloud and maintains the deployment. You manage your workers.

See the BYOC quickstart.

Architecture

Rivet has 3 core components:

• Worker: A process running your code with the Rivet SDK. It connects outbound to the control plane, so it never needs a public URL or an inbound firewall rule.
• Control plane: The orchestration service that manages actor lifecycle, routes messages, and serves the API.
• Storage: The persistence layer for actor state and the messaging infrastructure for real-time communication.

Storage backends

• File system: Recommended for single-node deployments
• PostgreSQL: Recommended for multi-node deployments; production-ready for light-to-moderate workloads, not built for enterprise scale
• FoundationDB: Best scalability and performance for production deployments (requires enterprise)

See Storage for configuration.

Next steps

• Run a control plane
• Run workers