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Support your local airgap: reliable and sustainable development for cloud native airgaps
How do you bring cloud-native best practices to places where the cloud can’t reach? Brandt Keller has the answer! At Edgecase 2025, he showed how a cloud-native airgap mindset flips traditional delivery on its head—hardening the software supply chain, reducing operational toil, and enabling mission-critical systems to thrive whether they’re in a data center, a desert, or on the deck of a ship.
Demo: managing airgaps with Zarf
Brandt Keller is a software engineer at Defense Unicorns and an open-source maintainer. Under the motto ‘support your local airgaps’, he took the main stage to demo an open-source tool: Zarf Injector (https://zarf.dev). It’s a package manager designed to deploy software for airgapped Kubernetes environments. And it does so sustainably—not as a one-off, but continuously: easy to maintain, secure, and reliable.
Back to basics: why cloud native often goes wrong
That, Keller argued, reflects the core of cloud-based thinking. But too often, it’s oversimplified. Quoting Ellen Ullman, he warned: We build without a plan, on top of ruins. In other words, if it works for now, that’s enough. Day 2 operations? Nobody thinks about them—let alone what happens further down the road. And all too often, designers forget they are not the actual users.
Critical questions for airgapped solutions
Open-source Kubernetes applications are easy to get started with. But when you’re building robust and sustainable airgapped solutions, Keller noted, there are a few crucial questions: Why does the gap exist in the first place? Was it a conscious choice to remain disconnected? Does the infrastructure force it? How does an application behave under disrupted activity? Should it be aware of those conditions—or can other applications take over functions?
Dependency awareness is key, Keller emphasized. “What do you need to run something? How much memory or bandwidth do you have for a far-edge deployment? And does the activity interfere with the interface or other processes in the edge node?”
Always start with the user
Design for isolation, evolve with confidence—that’s the foundation of sustainable architecture. “Because environments keep changing, repeated testing under different conditions is essential”, Keller explained. Just as important: measuring what runs, when, and how. Across the entire supply chain, safety, trust, and integrity must be built in. “Even the packaging and delivery process matters: How many steps are involved? With whom, and where? How do you hand things over without making it messy?”
At the end of the day, Keller came back to his central point: always think from the user’s perspective. “It all comes down to user experience!”
