Air-Gapped Deployments: The Build vs Buy Decision

Airgapped deployments have a way of sneaking up on you.

At first, you’re focused on shipping a great SaaS product. Then a large enterprise or government prospect says they need your application deployed into their own environment. Then you learn it’s a tightly restricted or fully disconnected environment. Maybe it’s a defense customer. Maybe it’s financial services. Maybe it’s critical infrastructure. In every case, the requirement is the same: no internet access, strict controls, and full ownership of the runtime environment.

At that moment, you’re no longer just building software. You’re building a commercial distribution system.

The question becomes unavoidable: do you build your own air gap deployment solution, or do you buy one?

The Reality of Building It Yourself

For a technical team, building feels natural. You already produce container images. You already maintain Helm charts. Packaging those artifacts and delivering them into an offline environment seems like an incremental step.

And in the early days, it is.

You create a process to export images, bundle charts, and generate installation instructions. You test it internally. A customer runs through it. It works.

The friction appears over time.

“Air gap” does not have a single, consistent definition. One customer allows deployment into a managed Kubernetes cluster with restricted egress. Another requires a fully self-contained environment with no external dependencies. Some have strong platform teams with rigid opinions about the Helm charts they deploy. Others want a guided installer that abstracts Kubernetes and containers away entirely.

To support it all, you build and  maintain multiple deployment paths. You add logic to handle different registries, different storage backends, and different cluster configurations. Your release pipeline grows more complex and fragile. Every version requires careful packaging, mirroring, and validation in constrained environments.

What started as “bundle and ship” becomes a sprawling second surface area of your product.

The customer experience also begins to drift. Your SaaS feels polished and intuitive, but your air-gapped installation flow feels ad hoc and inconsistent. Even technically capable customers notice the difference. Installs stall and require deep Kubernetes troubleshooting, slowing sales cycles and generating support tickets and bug reports.

Most importantly, your engineering team becomes responsible for all of it. They have a backlog of undifferentiated infrastructure. Debugging why a package failed to install in a disconnected environment takes time away from building the core feature set. Over time the operational burden compounds.

What Changes When You Buy

Buying an air gap distribution solution shifts the responsibility.

Instead of bespoke scripts and packaging logic, you integrate your application into a system purpose-built for commercial software distribution into restricted environments. Artifact management, release workflows, installation mechanics, and upgrade paths are handled by an experienced platform that has been validated across many vendors and customer environments.

This changes the dynamic.

First, the installation experience is consistent. Whether a customer wants to deploy into their own cluster or use an embedded, self-contained environment, you have a defined, repeatable workflow. That consistency reduces friction during proof of concepts and accelerates production rollouts.

Second, support becomes scalable. When an issue arises in an air-gapped deployment, you are not debugging a one-off script written months ago. You are working within a known system with established patterns and support processes. That lowers the operational risk of expanding your air-gapped footprint.

Third, your team maintains focus. Instead of wasting cycles maintaining packaging pipelines and environment-specific logic, engineers prioritize product development. Distribution remains critical, but it no longer competes with your roadmap.

Of course, buying introduces tradeoffs. But for teams that expect to grow beyond a handful of air-gapped deployments, the predictability and operational leverage of a dedicated solution outweighs those tradeoffs.

A Strategic Decision, Not a Technical One

The build versus buy decision is less about technical feasibility and more about long-term strategy.

If you have a small market for air-gapped delivery and a team with spare cycles to maintain custom tooling, building can be sufficient in the short term. It can feel more flexible early on.

But when air-gapped environments become a meaningful revenue segment (and for many enterprise-focused vendors, they do), the calculus changes. You need predictable installs. You need a professional, repeatable customer experience. You need upgrade paths that do not require reinventing your packaging process with every release.

Ultimately, you need to decide what your company is optimizing for.

Air gap requirements rarely get simpler. Security expectations increase. Customer environments diversify. The operational surface area expands. Treating distribution as an afterthought will quietly transform it into your company’s second product - one that competes for engineering time and executive attention.

For most growing software vendors, buying a purpose-built solution is the pragmatic choice. It allows you to meet strict deployment requirements, deliver a seamless on-prem experience, and scale confidently without diverting focus from your core product.

Air gap is a deployment model. It should not become your core competency. It’s already ours.

Replicated helps software vendors ship into air gapped and restricted environments without turning distribution into a second product. If you’re ready to replace fragile packaging scripts with a repeatable, scalable install and upgrade experience, Replicated is built for exactly that.