Okteto consists of two products: our Okteto CLI and the Okteto Platform. We provide the Okteto Platform in two forms: Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), where Okteto runs and manages the platform in your own cloud account, and Self-Hosted, where you install and manage it in your own Kubernetes cluster using our Helm chart. Both offerings deliver the same Okteto Platform experience and features.

The Okteto Platform

In addition to Okteto's CLI we optionally provide the Okteto Platform. This is the other half of our product experience that provides the fully managed infrastructure for your development environments. It's what interprets the Okteto Manifest to spin up a development environment and automates your workflows. One of the biggest advantages of the Okteto Platform is that we scale the underlying cluster infrastructure so you never have to worry about your development environments having insufficient resources to run even your most complex applications.

Additionally, you can use the Okteto CLI without using the Okteto Platform, but there are important considerations with that use case.

Some examples of what the Okteto Platform manages are: configuring variables, adding external resources into your development environment, and build and push container images to the Okteto Registry. For a more comprehensive list of features, check out our docs.

Important things to know

BYOC	Self-Hosted
Okteto runs and manages the Okteto Platform in your own cloud account, handling upgrades, patching, and monitoring.	You install, upgrade, and operate the Okteto Platform in your own Kubernetes cluster.
You retain ownership of the cloud account and data with none of the operational overhead.	Full access to the Kubernetes cluster and fully integrates with the rest of your Kubernetes infrastructure.
Great for teams that want full control over their data and infrastructure without managing the platform themselves.	Great for air-gapped, highly regulated, or on-premise environments, or teams with Kubernetes expertise.