[aimazon]

You need access to their data to process it, any layer of indirection (like a database they control) is additional complexity without meaningful benefit. For clients with strict data control requirements, self-hosting of the whole system is the standard solution (with a very high licensing fee).

Something to keep in mind is that some clients are not operating in good faith, their goal isn't to work together to find a solution but to present roadblocks. The reasoning can be complicated, perhaps there's internal politics around which solution to use, perhaps your solution is receiving pushback because it's not the preferred solution of one stakeholder. You'll probably never know the true motivations, it's important not to get caught up in engineering a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

You've mentioned that the data you need access to is code: GitHub is a perfect comparable. GitHub's cloud service is used by the majority of companies with code, in fact, I'd guess even your clients are using GitHub's hosted services. If the problem is that your company doesn't have the reputation necessary to give these clients confidence that you can securely manage their code, that may just be a sign that right now, these clients aren't the right fit for you, and you should work with less antsy clients until you have built up the credibility.

[ukoki]

> their goal isn't to work together to find a solution but to present roadblocks. The reasoning can be complicated..

Or as simple as “the less I appear to value this solution, the lower the supplier will estimate my maximum price for it”

[alliewithane]

That is very valid. My problem is that a large portion of my possible clients seemed to be happy with the idea of the solution I provided. I was looking in it tech wise because I somewhat validated it for my current client-space.

Self-hosting seems like the most reliable option for the time being (or executing functions on the encrypted data without decrypting it) however, is it standard practice that I use Kubernetes to give them a preconfigured database that they can deploy on my own cloud? I wouldn't access the code except temporarily through a little script that talks to my cloud that comes along the database in the pod that they "self host." Would that be considered standard practice?

[aimazon]

No, that wouldn't be considered standard practice. Fundamentally, if you are able to control the code that executes then you can exfiltrate the data regardless of how it is stored. The reason self-hosting is a secure way to execute code against data is because it removes the code from your control: with self-hosting, you would give your code over to the client and then they would run it in their environment.

Providing your customers with their own database in your environment is a method for segregating their data and ensuring that there's no unintentional co-mingling of their data with other customers (which is a common problem in a multi-tenant environment) but it does not protect the customer data from being accessed by you: if code you are executing can access the data, then you can access the data.

Reading between the lines ("a large portion of my possible clients seemed to be happy with the idea of the solution I provided") it sounds like my initial understanding of the situation was incorrect: I thought that you had been asked to build this specific architecture by your clients but it sounds like it's the opposite: you've had an idea, come up with an architecture and then validated that idea with potential clients by describing the architecture? Is that correct?

If that's the actual situation, I think this is a much simpler problem to solve. Architecture is architecture, it isn't a part of the solution, it's a means to an end. There are a very small number of clients who may have strict security/compliance requirements that do necessitate this sort of complexity (which is where self-hosting comes in) but for the majority of clients, how the product works is immaterial, they care only about the results.

Realising that you've made a terrible mistake when building a system using the architecture you designed 6 months ago is a rite of passage, it is the process: every vision you have today for how your system will work is probably going to be wrong 6 months from now. That's completely normal, you will learn more about how your system should work in 1 month of building than you would in 6 months of planning.

Try to take a step back from thinking about architecture. One of the biggest dangers when working on an early stage technology product is committing yourself to a technical direction that then dictates the product direction. If, for example, you decide today to build a system that in which clients self-host the database that your code accesses, and then you decide you want to build a feature that requires 10x as many queries to the database, oops, you can't build that, because it would require your clients upgrade their self-hosted database resources, and getting them to do that will be all but impossible.

If you want to share more about your idea, I can outline some ideas about how I might approach building it in a cheap way that allows for validating the idea. There are exceptions but nowadays, given the maturity of the software development space, most ideas can be built and launched to validate with real customers in 1 month. If your vision for how you'll build something requires, 3, 6 or 12 months to get customers using it, it's probably over complicated.