If you’ve heard the word airgap and thought “oh, that’s just for submarines,” you’re not wrong — but you’re also missing the bigger picture. Airgaps aren’t binary. It’s not either full-internet or total-isolation. This may seem counterintuitive to some… Airgap feels pretty binary. There’s a spectrum here — maybe not all functions or capabilities within your system are airgap-dendent. Understanding where your system lives on this spectrum is key to building something that doesn’t fall over the second a network hiccups. ...

If you’ve ever worked in a disconnected environment - or even just a flaky one - you probably understand. That feeling when something fails not because your code is broken, but because your tooling made an assumption about connectivity. A tiny one. A quiet one. But critical enough to tank the whole operation. Let’s talk more about that. Cloud native assumes the internet will always be there Most modern platforms lean hard on SaaS services, cloud APIs, dynamic registries, and live secrets. This makes things feel seamless - until the network drops, your git platform goes sideways, or DNS just stops cooperating. ...

Welcome to the first post in my Cloud Native Airgap Fundamentals series. If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve been burned by a dependency you didn’t even know you had. A Helm chart that fetched something from an external source or had sub-charts. A Kubernetes deployment that pulled an image at runtime. (IE Operator) A pipeline that silently relied on a cloud API to fetch secrets. A security application that requires centralized data retrieval for operation. ...