Key concepts & glossary

How Tensor9 works

The simplest mental model for Tensor9 is that it delivers your existing SaaS stack into any customer environment. Your customers then use your product by interacting with their own private instance of your stack. To make this easy for you, Tensor9 watches your existing SaaS stack (in your cloud) and continuously synchronizes to your customers (in their environment).

Tensor9 is able to accomplish this for a variety of customer environments by reading the infrastructure-as-code representation of your stack (for example, CloudFormation) and compiling it into a form suitable for deployment to your customers' environments.

Vendor

A vendor represents a software provider that delivers its applications to end customers (referred to as "customers"). The vendor’s primary goal is to package, deploy, and support their applications in the form of Tensor9 Apps that run in customer-controlled environments called appliances.

Each vendor is associated with metadata that defines its branding, deployment setup, and configuration. This metadata helps vendors deliver a seamless experience by customizing how their apps are presented to customers and how they are managed through Tensor9.

Customer

A customer represents an end customer who purchases and runs a vendor’s app in their own infrastructure. Customers are organizations such as enterprises, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and other regulated industries that require applications to run securely within their own controlled environments.

Each customer is associated with metadata that defines their organization, preferences, and any custom configurations related to their appliances.

App

An app represents the software product that a vendor packages and delivers to their customers. An app includes the application code, infrastructure, and any associated services required to run the vendor's software in a customer's appliance.

An app is designed to be deployed in customer-controlled environments, allowing customers to run the vendor’s software securely within their own infrastructure.

Appliance

An appliance represents the secure, self-contained environment where a vendor's app runs within a customer's infrastructure. The appliance mirrors the configuration of the vendor's origin stack and provides the necessary compute, storage, and networking resources while ensuring that all data remains under the customer’s control.

Projection

A projection represents the manifestation of a specific app running within a specific appliance. Each projection connects the vendor’s app configuration to the appliance's resources, ensuring that the app behaves consistently while adapting to the infrastructure and constraints of the customer’s environment.

Form Factor

A form factor defines the environment and constraints in which an appliance runs. It specifies the cloud provider, connectivity level, and security requirements, ensuring that the vendor's app adapts to the customer’s infrastructure while meeting operational and compliance needs.

A form factor describes essential attributes such as whether the appliance runs in AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-premises; whether it is air-gapped or connected to the internet; and any regulatory requirements such as FIPS or CMMC compliance.

Origin Stack

An origin stack represents the original definition of the software, infrastructure, and services that make up a vendor’s app. The origin stack is defined as infrastructure-as-code (such as CloudFormation) and serves as the source of truth for deployments. Tensor9 builds a deep understanding of the origin stack in order to manifest it across different Form Factors, such as cloud accounts or on-prem environments.

The origin stack specifies all the infrastructure components (such as databases, storage, or compute clusters) and configurations that Tensor9 synchronizes within customer Appliances.

Digital Twin

Tensor9 creates a nano-sized digital twin of the stack running in each customer's environment. This digital twin reflects the deployment and operational state of its corresponding customer stack. When you deploy changes to your SaaS stack, Tensor9 automatically synchronizes those changes to the digital twin for each customer, which in turn triggers deployments to the corresponding customer stacks. Similarly, logs, metrics, and alerts produced by a customer stack are continuously published back to the stack's digital twin. Software and hardware failures are also continuously published back to the digital twin. The end result is that you can observe, debug, and support your customer's stack as if it were local by observing and deploying to its digital twin.

Release

A release represents a versioned deployment of a vendor’s app to customer appliances. A release captures the current state of the vendor’s origin stack and packages it for continuous synchronization with customer environments. Vendors can focus on releasing their software as they normally would, while Tensor9 handles propagating updates across different form factors.

Releases ensure that vendors can push updates and fixes seamlessly, with minimal operational overhead, while maintaining alignment with customer requirements for security, privacy, and control.