How Tensor9 works

Tensor9 delivers your existing app to your customers as a private appliance installed directly into their environment. A Tensor9 controller in your cloud account creates a control plane that orchestrates deployments, and allows you to operate and observe your customers’ appliances:

Here are the steps you’ll take to use Tensor9:

Connect your stack

Connect your app’s origin stack to Tensor9. Tensor9 supports origin stacks defined in: Terraform/OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Kubernetes Manifests/Helm, and Docker Compose/Containers.

Create an appliance

Create an appliance for the customer environment you want to deploy to. An appliance is defined by its form factor, which specifies the target environment like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, or a customer-provided Kubernetes cluster, as well as which managed cloud services are required. You create an appliance using tensor9 CLI or the Vendor Portal. Your customer completes setup through a guided install wizard, a white-labeled web interface branded with your logo and company name.

Compile your stack

Use tensor9 CLI to compile your origin stack into a deployment stack for your new appliance. Tensor9 compiles your stack for the form factor of that appliance. For example, if your appliance is running in DigitalOcean on Kubernetes, then the compilation process will automatically replace an AWS load balancer in your origin stack with a Kubernetes ingress exposed via a DigitalOcean load balancer, and similarly replace AWS Aurora Postgres in your origin stack with a DigitalOcean managed Postgres instance.

Deploy to an appliance

Use standard tooling to deploy your deployment stack to a customer appliance. For example, if your origin stack is defined using Terraform/OpenTofu, then invoke terraform apply or tofu apply on a deployment stack to deploy that stack to the appliance it was compiled for.

Observe & operate appliances

Observe the state, performance, and usage of deployed resources in customer appliances; with metrics, logs, and traces asynchronously synchronized back to your observability sink of choice. Monitor appliance health from the Vendor Portal dashboard or the CLI.You can also operate deployed resources within customer appliances. For example, execute kubectl commands or request temporary, scoped access to cloud resources via IAM. Your customers review and approve operations requests through their Customer Portal.

Per-customer configuration

The same origin stack compiles into different deployment stacks for different customers, driven by customer-supplied configuration. Each customer can pick their ingress posture (public, allowlisted, Tailscale, or fully private), substitute their own managed services for default-shipped ones (for example, the customer’s own managed Temporal), and choose how the appliance reaches your control plane (public internet, AWS PrivateLink, or Tailscale). You ship one stack; each customer gets a build shaped to their environment. See Auto-Customizations for the full picture.

How Tensor9 compares to building it yourself

Feature	With Tensor9	Without Tensor9
Service Equivalents	Maintain a single origin stack. Tensor9 maps cloud services to their equivalents in the target environment during compilation (e.g., RDS → Cloud SQL, S3 → GCS).	Maintain separate infrastructure code for each cloud provider. Port resources manually and keep feature parity across cloud-specific APIs.
Deployments	Tensor9 compiles your origin stack into a deployment stack for a private appliance in your customer’s environment. Deploy using standard tooling locally (`terraform apply`, `tofu apply`), and Tensor9 applies changes to the corresponding appliance through a secure channel.	Manually set up a deployment pipeline unique to each customer environment. Request temporary access to customer infrastructure (VPN, IAM roles) for each deployment and execute operations manually.
Observability	Telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) flows from appliances to your observability sink. Tensor9 configures forwarding automatically based on your origin stack.	Set up monitoring agents, configure log forwarding, and manage telemetry infrastructure separately in each customer environment.
Operations	Execute operations commands remotely through your control plane with customer approval workflows and audit logging.	Request and manage temporary access credentials for each operation. Coordinate with customers for access to their infrastructure.
Artifacts	Tensor9 identifies artifacts in your origin stack and copies them to appliance-local storage during deployment (container images, S3 objects).	Build artifact replication and distribution systems. Manage credentials for artifact access across customer environments.
Secrets	Store customer-specific secrets in your control plane with access controls defining vendor vs. customer-only access.	Manage secrets across multiple systems. Coordinate with customers for secret injection and rotation.
Endpoints and DNS	Tensor9 provisions DNS records for each appliance under a domain you specify (vendor-owned or customer-owned) with delegation to customer infrastructure where appropriate.	Coordinate with customer network teams to configure DNS for each deployment.

Tensor9

Getting Started

How It Works

Deploying

Your Customer's Environment

Auto-Customizations

Security

Connectivity & Networking

Observability & Operations

tensor9 CLI

How Tensor9 works

Per-customer configuration

How Tensor9 compares to building it yourself

​Per-customer configuration

​How Tensor9 compares to building it yourself

Per-customer configuration

How Tensor9 compares to building it yourself