Architecture & ownership
On-Premises and Air-Gapped Deployment
Some organisations cannot put their project portfolio in somebody else's cloud. Defence programmes, critical national infrastructure, parts of health and finance, and any programme whose schedule is itself sensitive all fall into this group. For them the first question about a project management tool is not which features it has. It is whether it can run inside the boundary at all.
This one can. That comes from how it is built, not from a special edition.
Why it deploys where other tools cannot
The planning application is browser-local. There is no application server in the data path for day-to-day work. The services around it (logins and licences, publishing, dashboards, the website, the help assistant) are ordinary containers that run on your servers.
That makes it an unusually small thing to deploy and approve:
- no vendor telemetry to negotiate
- no phone-home address to allow through the firewall
- no third-party scripts, fonts or libraries loaded at runtime
- no control plane you do not operate
Three ways to acquire it, three places to run it
Keep the two questions separate and the choice becomes straightforward.
What do you acquire?
| You acquire | You are responsible for | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscribe | a subscription to the hosted service | nothing operational |
| Containers | pre-built, versioned Docker images and the tbown deployment package | your servers and their operation |
| Own the code | the complete source, plus the same containers and deployment package | development, your own image builds, servers and operation |
Where does it run? With containers or the source, wherever you choose:
- your public cloud tenancy
- your own data centre, on premises
- a network with no route out at all
On premises: the tbown package
Containers and the source both come with tbown, the deployment package. One file on a
workstation describes all your environments; one command turns it into a ready-made
package per environment; numbered scripts, or a single deploy-all.sh, bring up all six
containers on each server. HTTPS comes from our Caddy proxy or from your own proxy, using
the routes the package writes out for you.
How the deployment works.
Licences and logins are served by the backend container on your own servers, so nothing depends on a service run by us.
Air-gapped: the same install, carried in
Because everything is containerised, an air-gapped installation is the ordinary installation with the files carried in rather than downloaded:
- On the connected side, prepare the environment's package and export it as one archive. Pull the versioned images and save them to files.
- Scan the images with your own tools, then carry everything across your boundary by whatever process you already use.
- Inside, load the images and run the same numbered scripts. There is no activation call-out.
- Use Caddy with its own internal certificates, or your own proxy with your internal certificate authority.
- Users open the application in a browser on the internal network. After the first visit the app reloads with no network at all, and planning data stays on their machines.
Updates follow the same path. You decide when they happen, which for a regulated programme is usually the point.
Own the code: rebuild, then deploy the same way
With the source, your developers can change anything, build their own images, and deploy them with the same tbown scripts we use. Inside a closed network that means features that normally need the internet can be reconnected to your own systems. Ask AI can use a model hosted on your network, and notifications and email can use your internal services.
You acquire the complete codebase, build it yourself, and run it on infrastructure you control. There is no vendor to outlive, no forced upgrade, and no renewal conversation that can hold your portfolio hostage.
Because configuration is data rather than code, your field definitions, picklists and form layouts come with you as ordinary spreadsheet content. Even the customisation you have built up is portable.
The buyer's guide sizes the options honestly (hardware, skills and effort), so you can judge the commitment before you make it rather than after.