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After a U.S. federal contractor told us they loved Plane but couldn't use it due to ITAR requirements, we spent 6 months building a truly air-gapped version. No

After a U.S. federal contractor told us they loved Plane but couldn't use it due to ITAR requirements, we spent 6 months building a truly air-gapped version. No external connections, no license pings, no telemetry, everything runs in complete isolation. The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. This post covers the technical challenges we solved (supply chain trust, 2GB bundle size, offline licensing) and why regulated industries need alternatives to cloud-only tools like Jira.

jeron 1y ago
>our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. Notion, take notes
vosper 1y ago
> cloud-only tools like Jira. But Jira is not cloud-only? https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  They've removed it from their pricing page now, but when they announced the discontinuation of the regular on-prem server the minimum for datacenter was like 500 licensed users or something along those lines. In any case it was clear it's not for small shops like us. That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps those customers are predominantly large?
  - viharkurama 1y ago
    We took a different approach with Plane's air-gapped offering. No minimum user requirements at all. We evaluate based on your use case and domain requirements, not team size.
    - magicalhippo 1y ago
      Good approach IMHO. We do the similar with our B2B product (in an entirely different niche). We have everything from single-person companies up to very large ones. Similarly we set price based on use-case and requirements.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    It's still on this page: https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira $51k for the smallest license they offer. I still run an old version on an air gapped network and will continue to do so until we're forced to change for some reason. It's not a hefty requirement; we run it for a team of < 10 developers on a small VM and it just works.
    - magicalhippo 1y ago
      Blind as a bat, thanks. Was looking for a pricing page or similar, totally scrolled by that box which looked like marketing fluff.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    > That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps those customers are predominantly large? There are lots of very small classified networks out there with only a few dozen users. There are a lot more user communities course that aren’t necessarily airgapped, but where they have special compliance requirements that pretty much mandate self hosting (or at least bring-your-own cloud.)
- jasondc 1y ago
  $$$$ Very expensive
- bpt3 1y ago
  It might as well be for the vast majority of companies, since I believe the smallest number of users you can buy support for is 500. To be more specific, they killed off the legacy Jira Server and now only offer these enterprise versions of Jira and the rest of the suite if you won't move to the cloud.
- thaack 1y ago
  Sure if you commit to a 500 user minimum.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  Atlassian actually threatened to sue our company if we didn't move from on-prem to cloud. I imagine they're doing the same to others
  - GabeIsko 1y ago
    There has historically been massive investor and shareholder pressure for companies to show "Cloud Recurring Revenue" and multiple wall street analysts will start issuing higher price points for your stock based on this, and eventually large institutional investor adjust their positions accordingly. I like the cloud for a lot of reasons. But, making your software worse to make your stock price higher seems like a loser for everyone long term.
magicalhippo 1y ago
> Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. Same experience with JIRA. I read all these negative comments here and elsewhere about how slow and clunky JIRA was, and I couldn't relate at all. Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense. We've since moved to JIRA Cloud ourselves, and I understand now. We moved and none of the new places had any viable computer room, so literally had to put the rack in a closet And well, that ain't cutting it for physical access control these days. Thankfully we have very simple flows without any BS, so not too many 1-5 second clicks to get things done.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  > Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense. Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud. Btw it's not "JIRA".
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    > Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud. That would explain a lot. > Btw it's not "JIRA". When did they change this? I'm fairly certain[1] it used to be JIRA. [1]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061 https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061
    - eastbound 1y ago
      In 2013, to be specific.
  - joeldo 1y ago
    That's no longer the case - a large portion of teams are now using cloud variants of Confluence/Jira.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    What a weird time to enforce British rules for acronyms. JIRA stands for JIRA Isn't Really Awesome.
yodon 1y ago
How do you handle compliance in confirming that the product is only used for the license duration? (Or is it more of a one time purchase plus recurring fee for updates?)
- viharkurama 1y ago
  It's a subscription license. We offer air-gapped deployments under the Business plan. As part of compliance, we request customers to share license logs quarterly-no PII involved. Also, the license enforces seat limits, so you can't exceed the number of users you've purchased. https://plane.so/pricing https://plane.so/pricing
- Msurrow 1y ago
  At this level (govt, 6 figure+ deals) I would at least consider if this problem should have a non-tech solution, and instead have a legal/lawyer solution. In my experience (not US based though) the govt contracts are under compliance programmes as well so the govt agency’s legal/contract mgmt team would probably follow up internally on expiring contracts (ie licences) and require the owning stakeholder to either renew the contract or abandon the software. Meaning the customer would supervise itself regarding licence. But even if you don’t want to rely on self-supervision then having your lawyer spend 1 hour reaching out with a “do you need to renew your licence” at the end of a licence term would probably be much cheaper than building and maintaining an air-gapped licence solution.
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Years back a friend of mine's startup failed when USAF pirated their software and the original customer org stopped paying for it. Feds are DMCA immune, so no real recourse.
    - bigfatkitten 1y ago
      Sounds like having only one paying customer was the real cause of the business’s failure.
unixhero 1y ago
Itar ruins all the fun
isatty 1y ago
> The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. This is the least surprising thing I’ve read all day.
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  Indeed. For multiple reasons: - it is not at all surprising that when you remove cruft, code performs batter - it is not at all surprising that this is not common enough amongst software engineers to even consider these things (competing business interests probably cause this often)
  - graealex 1y ago
    Not being connected to the work VPN already slows down my Windows to a near halt since a few unreachable network drives is all it takes to make Explorer go unresponsive. Seems like engineers forget to test these things nowadays.
    - Too 1y ago
      If by ”nowadays” you mean the past 30 years. Slow network drives making Explorer go completely unresponsive has been a thing since Windows 95. I’m more surprised to hear that bug still hasn’t been fixed. Luckily I don’t use Windows myself since many years ago.
- chooma 1y ago
  All year maybe?
- chrisandchris 1y ago
  If they also realize that having less dependencies makes deployment easier we have gone full circle.
  - andy_ppp 1y ago
    I can't believe how many devs think dependancies are completely cost free...
beardedwizard 1y ago
But you didn't tell us how many orders of magnitude more expensive it is to operate :)
white_dragon88 1y ago
[dead]

jeron 1y ago

>our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. Notion, take notes

vosper 1y ago

> cloud-only tools like Jira. But Jira is not cloud-only? https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center

magicalhippo 1y ago
They've removed it from their pricing page now, but when they announced the discontinuation of the regular on-prem server the minimum for datacenter was like 500 licensed users or something along those lines. In any case it was clear it's not for small shops like us. That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps those customers are predominantly large?
- viharkurama 1y ago
  We took a different approach with Plane's air-gapped offering. No minimum user requirements at all. We evaluate based on your use case and domain requirements, not team size.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    Good approach IMHO. We do the similar with our B2B product (in an entirely different niche). We have everything from single-person companies up to very large ones. Similarly we set price based on use-case and requirements.
- bpt3 1y ago
  It's still on this page: https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira $51k for the smallest license they offer. I still run an old version on an air gapped network and will continue to do so until we're forced to change for some reason. It's not a hefty requirement; we run it for a team of < 10 developers on a small VM and it just works.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    Blind as a bat, thanks. Was looking for a pricing page or similar, totally scrolled by that box which looked like marketing fluff.
- bigfatkitten 1y ago
  > That said, air-gapped is a hefty requirement, so perhaps those customers are predominantly large? There are lots of very small classified networks out there with only a few dozen users. There are a lot more user communities course that aren’t necessarily airgapped, but where they have special compliance requirements that pretty much mandate self hosting (or at least bring-your-own cloud.)
jasondc 1y ago
$$$$ Very expensive
bpt3 1y ago
It might as well be for the vast majority of companies, since I believe the smallest number of users you can buy support for is 500. To be more specific, they killed off the legacy Jira Server and now only offer these enterprise versions of Jira and the rest of the suite if you won't move to the cloud.
thaack 1y ago
Sure if you commit to a 500 user minimum.
bowsamic 1y ago
Atlassian actually threatened to sue our company if we didn't move from on-prem to cloud. I imagine they're doing the same to others
- GabeIsko 1y ago
  There has historically been massive investor and shareholder pressure for companies to show "Cloud Recurring Revenue" and multiple wall street analysts will start issuing higher price points for your stock based on this, and eventually large institutional investor adjust their positions accordingly. I like the cloud for a lot of reasons. But, making your software worse to make your stock price higher seems like a loser for everyone long term.

magicalhippo 1y ago

> Turns out when you eliminate all network latency, things get snappy. Same experience with JIRA. I read all these negative comments here and elsewhere about how slow and clunky JIRA was, and I couldn't relate at all. Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense. We've since moved to JIRA Cloud ourselves, and I understand now. We moved and none of the new places had any viable computer room, so literally had to put the rack in a closet And well, that ain't cutting it for physical access control these days. Thankfully we have very simple flows without any BS, so not too many 1-5 second clicks to get things done.

IshKebab 1y ago
> Then I realized all those who complained was using JIRA Cloud and we were using on-prem, and it all made sense. Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud. Btw it's not "JIRA".
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  > Even Atlassian doesn't use Jira cloud. That would explain a lot. > Btw it's not "JIRA". When did they change this? I'm fairly certain[1] it used to be JIRA. [1]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061 https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061
  - eastbound 1y ago
    In 2013, to be specific.
- joeldo 1y ago
  That's no longer the case - a large portion of teams are now using cloud variants of Confluence/Jira.
- tomrod 1y ago
  What a weird time to enforce British rules for acronyms. JIRA stands for JIRA Isn't Really Awesome.

yodon 1y ago

How do you handle compliance in confirming that the product is only used for the license duration? (Or is it more of a one time purchase plus recurring fee for updates?)

viharkurama 1y ago
It's a subscription license. We offer air-gapped deployments under the Business plan. As part of compliance, we request customers to share license logs quarterly-no PII involved. Also, the license enforces seat limits, so you can't exceed the number of users you've purchased. https://plane.so/pricing https://plane.so/pricing
Msurrow 1y ago
At this level (govt, 6 figure+ deals) I would at least consider if this problem should have a non-tech solution, and instead have a legal/lawyer solution. In my experience (not US based though) the govt contracts are under compliance programmes as well so the govt agency’s legal/contract mgmt team would probably follow up internally on expiring contracts (ie licences) and require the owning stakeholder to either renew the contract or abandon the software. Meaning the customer would supervise itself regarding licence. But even if you don’t want to rely on self-supervision then having your lawyer spend 1 hour reaching out with a “do you need to renew your licence” at the end of a licence term would probably be much cheaper than building and maintaining an air-gapped licence solution.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  Years back a friend of mine's startup failed when USAF pirated their software and the original customer org stopped paying for it. Feds are DMCA immune, so no real recourse.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    Sounds like having only one paying customer was the real cause of the business’s failure.

unixhero 1y ago

Itar ruins all the fun

isatty 1y ago

> The interesting part: our air-gapped deployment actually runs faster than our SaaS version. This is the least surprising thing I’ve read all day.

jagged-chisel 1y ago
Indeed. For multiple reasons: - it is not at all surprising that when you remove cruft, code performs batter - it is not at all surprising that this is not common enough amongst software engineers to even consider these things (competing business interests probably cause this often)
- graealex 1y ago
  Not being connected to the work VPN already slows down my Windows to a near halt since a few unreachable network drives is all it takes to make Explorer go unresponsive. Seems like engineers forget to test these things nowadays.
  - Too 1y ago
    If by ”nowadays” you mean the past 30 years. Slow network drives making Explorer go completely unresponsive has been a thing since Windows 95. I’m more surprised to hear that bug still hasn’t been fixed. Luckily I don’t use Windows myself since many years ago.
chooma 1y ago
All year maybe?
chrisandchris 1y ago
If they also realize that having less dependencies makes deployment easier we have gone full circle.
- andy_ppp 1y ago
  I can't believe how many devs think dependancies are completely cost free...

beardedwizard 1y ago

But you didn't tell us how many orders of magnitude more expensive it is to operate :)

white_dragon88 1y ago

[dead]