Glean currently offers two deployment models for customers: Glean Hosted (SaaS) and Customer-Hosted (Cloud-Prem). Regardless of the deployment model chosen:
  1. Glean only uses a single-tenant infrastructure, meaning that each customer’s data is isolated from other customers’ data. Customer data does not leave this environment.
  2. Glean is responsible for infrastructure and application management, including upgrades, patching, and monitoring.
  3. Glean maintains support access to the customer environment for debugging and support purposes.
Our product is the same in both deployment models, with the only difference being where the infrastructure is hosted.

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Glean Hosted (SaaS)

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Description

In this scenario, Glean hosts your Glean instance within our own tenant. This is equivalent to a true SaaS service. The customer does not have any infrastructure responsibility in this model. The cloud provider that Glean uses is GCP.

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Advantages

  • Simplified setup process - no infrastructure setup required on customer end.
  • Full auto-scaling as the corpus and users grow.
  • Rely on Glean’s security controls and guarantees to protect your data.
  • Simpler licensing and pricing model. Glean is responsible for all infrastructure costs.
  • Multiple regions supported

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When should you choose this?

  • You do not want to host the infrastructure for Glean.
  • You want a full out-of-the-box experience.
  • You want to have a simpler pricing model.

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Customer-Hosted (Cloud-Prem)

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Description

In the Cloud-prem model, your Glean tenant is deployed by Glean as a managed service in isolation within your own cloud environment (i.e. GCP, AWS). Note that this is equivalent to a hosted-SaaS model where Glean still has minimal access to operate it like as SaaS service. This is not a traditional self-hosted model.

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Advantages

  • Full data residency guarantees - data does not leave your organizational boundaries
  • Enhanced visibility - you have full access to all raw logs stored within Glean
  • Additonal options for networking to internal resources - while Glean still operates in an isolated VPC controlled by Glean, organizations have more options for networking to internal resources.
  • Additional security controls - customers can apply VPC SC + Org policies (GCP) or SCPs (AWS) to further lock down the project.
  • Use your existing cloud spend commitments to retire the costs of hosting Glean. Glean provides lower licensing costs for customers that host Glean in their own cloud environment.

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When should you choose this?

  • You have strict data residency requirements where data cannot leave your organizational boundaries. Alternative geographic regions are also available in SaaS
  • You want full access to raw logs for compliance or security reasons
  • You want to leverage your existing cloud spend commitments to retire the costs of hosting Glean
  • You want additional security controls and networking options on the project
Glean does not support manually deploying/patching the Glean services, or altering any part of the Glean architecture. Glean’s architecture is not just a set of containerized services: It is a fully integrated system spanning different private networks, storage, databases, compute resources, and other integrated services.If your organization has significant restrictions on what can be deployed in your cloud environment, we recommend considering the Glean-hosted option instead.
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