An on-premises virtual appliance, for building virtual appliances.
Meta runs 100% offline and behind your firewall. It gives you full control over your appliance build process, including the ability to automate builds and updates using a REST API. Of course, we use Meta to build and update Meta ;)
Learn more about Meta hereTell us your story and describe your software stack
Eliminate third-party dependencies, and enable enterprise feature flags
We'll iterate on your appliance until it's ready for production
Your customers can maintain complete privacy and control of their data through an on-premises virtual appliance. It's designed to avoid the high bandwidth and storage costs of large datasets in the Cloud.
We ensure your customers can import your virtual appliance with one-click. Updates are just as easy, and can be performed entirely offline without internet access.
Your appliance is designed to stay up-to-date with the latest security fixes. Encryption can provide security for data in transit and at rest, thus enabling compliance with various laws and regulations.
Cloud software is a moving target, which is unsuitable for the enterprise. We ensure the virtual appliance is rock-solid, stable, and built on battle-tested software.
Installers require your customers to pre-configure their environment according to your specifications. Chances are, they won't.
When an update fails, it could leave your customer's installation in an unknown state, and potentially lose all their data.
Internet access should not be a requirement for installing and updating. Enterprise environments require offline usage.
Enterprises paying thousands of dollars for software expect a professional product. The "./install" lowers your product's value.
The first run of your application should be smooth and free of defects. If you can't guarantee a great user experience, you lose potential sales.
Multiple OS/version support is a burden on your team. A well designed virtual appliance gives you full control and decreases support.
All On-Prem virtual appliances are built on a small GNU/Linux base operating system (~12MB). We make sure to only include the strict minimum for your app to run.
The OS and system files are loaded in memory on boot. This ensures the system is immutable and won't accidentally be modified. You get a clean-slate on every boot.
No phone-home. By default, all On-Prem appliances are designed to work entirely offline. This provides your customers with full privacy and control of their data.
The update process is atomic and can guarantee a successful update with no downtime. Updates can be uploaded to the appliance (offline), or downloaded from a URL (online).
Update packages contain binary diffs of your app and the OS. An update package can be reduced to only a few Kilobytes depending on the changes it contains.
All update packages are signed and encrypted to ensure they haven't been tampered with. Your customers can feel safe about applying software updates.
Appliances are exported as OVAs, and can run on VirtualBox, VMware, XenServer, Hyper-V, and AWS. The OVA disks can be converted to run on KVM/Qemu/Xen, or on bare-metal hardware.
A console GUI is included for configuring basic network settings. We also include a web Dashboard so your customers can easily manage their virtual appliance once deployed.
A REST API is included in the virtual appliance, so your customers can automate their updates, retrieve system information, logs, graphs, and even reboot the appliance.
Multiple storage options can be made available for your customers. Local XFS-on-LVM disks automatically expand. Network storage can be configured for NFS, AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet), iSCSI, or NBD.
Even when deploying a desktop application (ex: Java-based GUI), it can be launched automatically with X Windows, and accessed remotely via RDP or VNC. No need to rewrite your app.
Extensive local logging provides the ability to track application and system activity. Logs can easily be retrieved and analyzed by the appliance administrator.
Use our web-based On-Prem Meta Appliance, or the REST API to automate your appliance builds.
Integrate with Jenkins, pull code from GitHub, send updates to Slack, and/or do it all from your computer.
Continuous Integration tools such as Jenkins can be configured to connect to the On-Prem Meta REST API. Every endpoint and parameter is extensively documented with examples, and is included in the Meta appliance for offline access.
Push your code to GitHub, and have it pulled automatically from Meta, thanks to the Webhooks integration. The offline alternative is to push directly to Meta.
The Slack integration will send build status updates to your Slack Channel, along with download links for the OVAs and Update Packages.
The AWS integration allows you to push your builds to AWS and convert them to standard Amazon AMIs. The on-prem and AMI builds are absolutely identical, and can be updated by the exact same update packages.
The MQTT/Websockets queue settings enable simpler monitoring of build status and log updates. Queues are read-only, and access requires TLS encryption and username/password authentication.
Set the concurrency level as high as your server can support. Meta builds are so fast, this number might not matter so much.
We aim to provide freedom for our customers to use Meta how they see fit, and openly welcome feature requests.
