Airplane is the developer platform for building powerful custom internal tools. With Airplane, you can transform scripts, queries, and APIs into custom UIs and workflows that fit the unique needs of your business.
Our code-first approach makes it easy to customize operations and provides a flexible platform where everything can be version controlled, tested, and integrated with the rest of your codebase. Developers use Airplane to build admin panels, multi-step workflows, long-running jobs, scheduled operations, on-call runbooks, and more.
At Airplane, security is at the heart of everything we do. This is why we support self-hosted Airplane agents to allow you to bring the power of Airplane into your own environments. Today, we’re announcing a new feature that will further allow you to use Airplane securely and entirely within your own infrastructure.
Introducing: self-hosted storage
We’re excited to announce our newest beta feature: self-hosted storage. Self-hosted storage extends our self-hosted agent model to store logs and outputs in your team’s infrastructure. Now, you can run tasks entirely in your own VPC, and none of your logs or outputs will transit through Airplane’s systems.
Our customers rely on Airplane to run sensitive operations safely. With self-hosted storage, you’ll be able to exceed the most rigorous security and compliance requirements for safeguarding your data.
Best of all, self-hosted storage requires minimal maintenance by customers. No database upgrades and no downtime necessary. Just apply the CloudFormation or Terraform changes and you're set up in a matter of minutes.
Our approach
While other software platforms provide a fully self-hosted solution that requires you to self-host the entire SaaS application, we built Airplane as a hybrid model to allow you to leverage the benefits of SaaS while still maximizing security. In Airplane, we give you the best of both worlds; you can self-host the agents as well as the data without having to manage the parts of the application that aren’t sensitive.
Here’s what our customers use self-hosting for
Our self-hosted agent model and self-hosted storage solution are ideal for companies who:
- Have private databases or APIs that require connections from within their networks
- Are required to keep sensitive data like PII and PHI entirely within their own VPCs
- Prefer to have dedicated compute resources instead of using Airplane’s multi-tenant infrastructure
- Want to store table outputs with sensitive information such as financial data securely in their own environments
Here’s how it works
- Agent as a server: With self-hosted storage, each agent becomes a server in addition to handling task orchestration. This server processes requests from your teams’ browsers which now hit an agent instead of the Airplane API to collect logs and outputs for runs managed by the agent.
- Intermediate storage: When you enable the self-hosted storage feature on all your agents or on a subset, the agent uses an intermediate database for storing fresh run data. These data are made available to respond to user queries and are periodically aggregated and flushed into the long-term store.
- Long-term storage: The agent uses a blobstore system for low-cost, long-term persistence of run data. We currently support AWS S3 for this, but in the future, we may extend this to other cloud providers.
Check out our Setup guide to get started with self-hosted storage and let us know if you have any questions! (Note: Self-hosted storage is currently only available on our Enterprise plan but we’re happy to chat with you about your situation. Please email us at [email protected].)
What’s next
There’s a lot that we’re excited about building at Airplane in the coming months. We’re working on permissions improvements to provide even more nuanced team roles, Airplane OIDC to provide a signed token to authenticate to AWS and other APIs, and internal embeds to allow you to iframe your Views and Tasks into other sites!
If you think Airplane could be a good fit for your company or want to learn more about what we’re building, you can sign up for free or say hi at [email protected] 👋.
If you’re a startup with under 100 employees that’s Series A or earlier, you’re eligible for $10,000 in Airplane credits. Check out Airplane for Startups to get started!
