Deploying a self-hosted instance with SurrealDB is quick and easy. All of SurrealDB's functionality for starting a server, and importing and exporting data, is enabled through the command-line tool, packaged and distributed as a single executable file, which can be downloaded, installed, or run from within Docker.
Once a self-hosted instance is running, the Observability section covers the built-in metrics, audit logs and slow-query logs you can scrape over Prometheus or push over OTLP for production monitoring.
Guides
| Guide | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Docker | Quickest path; RocksDB with a volume mount |
| Kubernetes | Single SurrealDB pod with RocksDB on a persistent volume |
| Amazon EKS / GKE / AKS | Highly available clusters on managed Kubernetes |
| SurrealDB Cloud | Managed infrastructure without operating servers yourself |
Most self-hosted workloads use RocksDB on disk — one SurrealDB process per database file. See Deployment models for how single-node and highly available topologies compare.