Air-gapped deployments

Both offline delivery forms make no outbound calls at runtime. Neither one, however, installs itself out of thin air: a Helm install pulls container images and the chart from a registry, and the appliance needs its image on the host. An air-gapped deployment is about getting those artifacts across the boundary.

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Which form to choose

The All-in-One appliance is the straightforward answer to a strict air gap: one image with every weight baked in, moved to the disconnected host as a file and loaded there. There is nothing else to mirror. The Helm chart is more work, because the release is many images rather than one. Every image has to be mirrored into a registry the cluster can reach and the release pointed at it, component by component — there is no single switch. Plan for the whole set, and expect to do it with your account team rather than alone. What you give up either way: images are pinned to the exact content Fish Audio published, so a deployment cannot quietly run anything else. Copying an image into another registry drops that pin, so check what you mirrored while both sides are still there to compare.

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Offline usage accounting

An offline deployment cannot call a billing service, so it records usage locally instead, in a signed ledger on persistent storage. It is durable data rather than cache: include it in your backups, and agree a reconciliation cadence with your account team. Usage is settled from the ledger files themselves, not from totals compiled off them. Because there is no service to validate a token against, any non-empty bearer token is accepted and recorded as the billing identity. Use a stable, distinct token per tenant.

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Proving there is no egress

Regulated deployments usually need evidence rather than a configuration review, and the runbook carries the exercise. Two things are worth knowing before you plan it. It answers two questions, and they need different methods: whether the deployment needs the internet, and whether it calls out when allowed to — the second is what a telemetry or data-residency review actually asks. It is also a cluster-level exercise rather than a namespace one. Confirm early that whoever runs your cluster can take part, because a namespace-scoped account cannot complete it.

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Next steps

• Requirements — hardware, platform, and network baselines
• All-in-One container — the single-container form
• Kubernetes deployment — the Helm forms