Using the PoC Installer in an Air-Gapped Environment

Defining Air-Gapped Environments

An air-gapped environment is any environment in which the running hosts will not have access to the greater internet. This proposes a situation in which these hosts are unable to get access to various needed bits of software from Element and also are unable to share telemetry data back with Element.

For some of these environments, they can be connected to the internet from time to time and updated during those connection periods. In other environments, the hosts are never connected to the internet and everything must be moved over sneaker net.

This guide will cover running the microk8s installer when only sneaker net is available as that is the most restrictive of these environments.

microk8s and helm3

Download microk8s components on connected machine.

Copy microk8s components to air gapped host and install using snap.

Getting Element's Container Images into your air-gapped environment.

Workflow on connected host:

Get installer from Element. Run download_images.sh and point this at an images directory. Tar up the installer that download_images.sh has run on and the images directory.

Take this installer and the images directory to the air gapped environment and deploy.