Offline Workflow Execution in Air-Gapped Environments

Organizations such as healthcare or governments have critical infrastructures where security plays an important role, as a result, most of them decide to operate in an air-gapped environment to minimize the attack surface in their network, or also restrictions such as absence of certain tools such as container orchestrator runtimes. However, in many cases they still require the services of a third-party cloud platform such as automation platforms for their complex workflows. This thesis aims to address this issue by designing and validating an offline workflow execution design for WeHub, an iPaaS process automation service. Using the Design Science Methodology, this project investigates how microservice based plugins and services in a cloud platform can be transformed into an offline-capable artifact for deployment in air-gapped settings. After comprehensive research on available approaches, the designed treatment introduces a bundling mechanism to go over the air-gapped environment limitations. This design statically links each individual microservice plugin and mocks the other services required to execute a workflow, and injects dependencies through abstract interfaces, resulting in a self-contained lightweight binary. After validation, it is concluded that the prototype achieves cross-platform compatibility, low resource consumption, and relative installation simplicity (≤ 4 steps), satisfying key business and quality requirements. The final artifact enables offline deployment of automation workflows via a self-contained binary with significant performance increase while sacrificing monitorability for each service, scalability, versioning and zero-downtime updates. It contributes a design approach for portable workflow systems and highlights tradeoffs between modularity and operational simplicity in constrained environments which can be adopted indirectly by similar projects as well.