A StreamNative Instance represents a cohesive group of clusters functioning together as a unified entity.

Each instance is uniquely identified by a Uniform Resource Name (URN) that follows the structure urn:sn:pulsar:organization-id:pulsar-instance-name. You can retrieve the organization name and instance name using the snctl get organizations <organization-id> and snctl get pulsarinstance <instance-name> commands, respectively. When a Pulsar client connects to a Pulsar cluster using OAuth2 authentication, this URN is required as audience to use for the authentication process.

After creating an organization, you can create one or more Serverless, Dedicated, or BYOC instances within that organization. However, before creating BYOC instances, you must first provision one or more BYOC infrastructure pools in your cloud accounts.

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Instance Overview

An Instance is a logical entity that groups one or more clusters. Clusters can be distributed across multiple geographic regions and replicated between them using geo-replication.

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Instance Types

StreamNative supports three types of instances:

  • Serverless: A fully managed instance on StreamNative’s cloud infrastructure that automatically scales based on the workload.
  • Dedicated: A dedicated instance on StreamNative’s cloud infrastructure that you can fully control the underlying resources allocated to the instance.
  • BYOC / BYOC Pro: A Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) instance that you can manage and control in your cloud accounts. A BYOC Pro instance is an advanced version of BYOC that supports advanced private networking and security features.

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Availability Modes

The availability mode of an instance determines how clusters are distributed across availability zones within a geographic region. StreamNative supports two availability modes:

  • Regional: Clusters are distributed across multiple availability zones within a geographic region, providing higher availability and fault tolerance.
  • Zonal: Clusters are deployed in a single availability zone within a geographic region.

Currently, StreamNative Cloud only supports the Regional availability mode. Support for Zonal availability mode will be available in a future release.

All the clusters within an instance must use the same availability mode.

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Pool Reference

An instance is deployed to one infrastructure pool, which can be either Fully Hosted (for Serverless and Dedicated instances) or BYOC (for BYOC instances). A pool reference identifies which pool will be used for deploying instances.

  • For Serverless and Dedicated instances, the pool reference points to StreamNative’s fully hosted pools. The pool_namespace is always set to streamnative.
  • For BYOC or BYOC Pro instances, the pool reference points to pools that are provisioned through cloud environments in your cloud accounts. The pool_namespace is set to the organization ID where the cloud environment was created.

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Data Streaming Engine

The data streaming engine of an instance determines which engine will be used for running the clusters within the instance. Below is a table that lists the supported engines for different instance types:

Instance TypeClassic EngineUrsa Engine
Serverless✅❌
Dedicated✅❌
BYOC✅✅
BYOC Pro✅✅

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Next steps

After creating an instance, you can create a cluster within the instance.