Airgap-Chapter-2

We’ve talked about personas. We’ve talked about environments. Now we need to talk about delivery. Because for all the advances in containerization, infrastructure as code, and supply chain security—getting software to run in disconnected or semi-connected environments is still far too hard. And the reasons why come down to friction. Disconnection Isn’t New—But Our Tooling Assumes It Is Disconnected systems have existed for decades: industrial control networks, classified enclaves, and remote field operations. What’s changed is the expectation that these environments should run modern, cloud-native applications—and the tooling that assumes a persistent cloud connection to do so. ...

When we talk about disconnected systems, we tend to imagine a binary state—something either connected or not. But that’s not how the real world works. Disconnection is not a fixed category. It’s a moving target shaped by mission needs, geography, infrastructure, policy, and even weather. The people who operate in those environments are just as varied as the systems they depend on. Who Are We Building For? Disconnected environments aren’t theoretical. They’re lived realities—places where people need to get real work done with constraints that most cloud-native assumptions ignore. ...

When you operate in an airgapped or semi-connected environment, technology decisions stop being expansive. It is no longer about which tools are shiny. It is about which ones will actually work when the internet is gone. Airgap constraints force sharper decisions at every layer of the stack. And the truth is, many of the most popular cloud native tools are not built with disconnection in mind. Let’s walk through what changes. ...

Airgapped systems are often treated as static, permanent, and immovable. They’re offline. They’re hardened. They’re not changing anytime soon. Until they do. More and more, we’re seeing environments that start as fully disconnected gradually gain controlled access to the outside world. A system that began life on a USB stick might later receive daily updates over a satellite link. A once fully isolated deployment might eventually support secure relay syncs or controlled egress through a policy gateway. ...

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. ...