What do I need to know about on-prem deployment?

[joehewett]

We (Asteroid W25) haven't deployed our software (https://asteroid.ai) to an enterprise customer on premises before. The customer needs to run our platform offline in an airgapped environment. The project is containerised and orchestrated with docker compose currently. The client is fine to not receive the source code and is happy to just receive pre-built images.

I think a fair few problems are going to arise here, namely things like: shipping regular updates, multi-arch builds etc.

Does anyone here have a good list of things we should be thinking about when doing our first on-premises deployment, or other points/resources we should have in mind?

Much appreciated

Joe

[ezekg]

The number one thing you'll need to do is to get more information about the customer environments, because that's the big variable here. Your next steps will largely depend on their current workflows i.r.t. how they distribute and deploy other container images. If they're also in uncharted waters, ask them how they deploy their own applications.

For my company, having a production-ready Docker image or precompiled binary available for the customer to use works fine, and they handle distributing it into their environment. There are tools like Replicated if you're looking for something a little more sophisticated for distribution.

For updates, we release quarterly, and the customer deploys updates on their own schedule. We require they be within LTS in order to receive support.

For builds, we build our images normally. Nothing is really unique here, and they pull what they need from our container registry.