While once an arduous, time-consuming, and error-prone process, the deployment of an air gapped k8s cluster has been greatly simplified. This simplification is due to the proliferation and maturity of tooling in the k8s ecosystem. Tools, such as Hauler, have drastically improved the experience of deploying an air gapped container registry mirror.

The standardization and proper configuration of the registry mirror option in k8s flavors allows easier control over how clusters attempt to source container images. This feature is completely transparent, which means that container images are “magically” pulled from where they need to be. This also means that developers and k8s cluster operators do not need to maintain different versions of k8s manifests or Helm values.yaml files, depending on whether they are in the air gap or not, relieving that maintenance burden and speeding the time to deployment.