# Deployment on your own terms

> Run the gateway where your compliance and network rules require, from a managed instance to an isolated server you operate.

Regulated, sovereign, and security-sensitive environments dictate where infrastructure can run and who is allowed to operate it. A control point that only exists as someone else’s hosted service is a non-starter when data cannot leave your network, or when your own team has to hold the keys.

## What you can do

- Run fully on-premises on bare metal or your own cloud instance so that data and keys never leave infrastructure you control.

- Deploy as a container so that the gateway drops into your existing Docker or orchestration workflow.

- Use a managed Affinidi appliance so that Affinidi runs the infrastructure while you administer policy and identity through the dashboard.

- Operate in restricted or air-gapped networks so that the gateway works with no dependence on public internet access.

- Run active and standby instances with leader election so that a failover keeps the control point available.

## How it works

The gateway ships as a single binary and a container image, so the same build runs on bare metal, in a cloud instance, or under Docker; a managed appliance is that same software operated by Affinidi and administered through the dashboard. Wherever it runs, it sits in the request path as a reverse proxy between your callers and their destination services, so the deployment model never changes how traffic is governed.

For availability, instances coordinate through a failover store (filesystem for a single host, DynamoDB for a multi-instance cluster) and elect one leader. Two endpoints drive orchestration: GET /api/v1/alive is a liveness probe that returns 200 once the process is up, and GET /api/v1/health is a readiness probe that returns 200 on the leader and 503 Service Unavailable on a standby, so a load balancer routes only to the active instance. To connect across a network boundary without opening inbound ports, a gateway reaches a cloud-hosted mediator over an outbound connection.

If the leader becomes unavailable, a standby wins the election and its /api/v1/health flips to 200, so the load balancer moves traffic to it without operator action.

## Related

- [Deploy an Agent Gateway appliance](/products/affinidi-trust-fabric/agent-gateway/get-started/deploy-agent-gateway-appliance-portal.md): Provision a managed instance through the Affinidi Portal.

- [Architecture](/products/affinidi-trust-fabric/agent-gateway/concepts/architecture.md): How the gateway’s layers and components fit together across deployment models.

- [Gateways](/products/affinidi-trust-fabric/agent-gateway/concepts/connections/gateways.md): How gateway-to-gateway connections span network zones and organisations.

- [DIDComm messaging](/products/affinidi-trust-fabric/agent-gateway/concepts/protocols/didcomm.md): The outbound mediator model that lets isolated zones connect without inbound ports.