A locked room. No wires out. No signals in. The code still ships.
Air-gapped deployment in DevOps is about absolute control. It means running your software in a fully isolated network with no internet connection — no inbound, no outbound. Every dependency, container image, and build artifact is brought in by deliberate, secured transfer. Nothing leaves unless you let it. This is how you keep your most critical workloads safe from external threats while still moving fast.
The demand for air-gapped DevOps is rising across industries with sensitive data, strict regulations, and zero tolerance for breaches. But isolation does not mean slow. With the right workflow, an air-gapped environment can run CI/CD pipelines, handle automated testing, and deploy at speed — all without touching the public internet.
The challenge is upstream. Typical DevOps pipelines rely on cloud repos, public registries, and SaaS build systems. In an air-gapped world, every step has to work internally. Source code mirrors, package registries, and container repositories must be hosted inside the network. Build agents, orchestration tools, and deployment scripts must run locally and be fully synced before the gap closes.
Security is more than a firewall here. In an air-gapped setup, every asset is vetted before it enters the environment. This reduces attack vectors to almost zero. Risks like supply-chain compromises, malicious dependencies, and leaked secrets are minimized. You control every byte.
Setting up an air-gapped deployment pipeline comes down to three pillars:
- Mirror Everything — Internal copies of source control, dependencies, images, and tooling.
- Automate with Local CI/CD — Self-hosted runners and build systems with no external calls.
- Audit and Sync Securely — One-way transfers with verification for updates.
Done right, this creates a closed-loop DevOps ecosystem that can deliver software at scale without internet exposure.
You don’t have to spend months building this from scratch. The right platform can give you a working, isolated pipeline in less than an afternoon. See how hoop.dev makes air-gapped deployment real and running in minutes — and experience the speed of secure, fully offline DevOps.