Air-gap deployment

Air-gap is not a downgrade — it is a first-class deployment mode with feature parity. This guide covers the offline install.

Pre-flight checklist#

• Air-gapped environment provisioned (Kubernetes 1.27+, 8 vCPU / 32 GB minimum)
• Postgres 16 available in-environment
• Offline bundle transferred (single archive, includes local models)
• Local model files verified by checksum
• No outbound connectivity required — confirmed by network policy

Install#

helm install orkena ./orkena-chart \
  --namespace orkena \
  --set mode=airgap \
  --set postgres.host=<in-cluster-postgres> \
  --set models.embedder=local \
  --set models.classifier=local \
  --set telemetry.enabled=false

Local models#

The bundle includes local models for embeddings and classifiers. Configure their paths:

models:
  embedder:
    local: /opt/orkena/models/embedder
  classifier:
    local: /opt/orkena/models/classifier

LLM inference requires a locally hosted model endpoint (vLLM, Ollama, or your existing inference stack) — there is no external model provider in air-gap mode.

First-run smoke test#

1. Confirm the API responds: curl localhost:8080/health → {"status":"ok"}
2. Run the quickstart template graph.
3. Export an evidence bundle and verify it offline on a fresh machine — no network, no Orkena dependency:

chain: N events verified · anchors: M signatures valid
RESULT: OK

What breaks without external connectivity#

• No auto-updates — upgrades are manual bundle transfers
• No telemetry back to Orkena — your ops team owns monitoring
• No external model providers — local endpoints only

That is the point. The runtime and its evidence are sovereign.