---
title: "Key Components"
slug: "fortanix-armor-on-premises-key-components"
updated: 2026-06-26T16:04:13Z
published: 2026-06-26T16:04:13Z
canonical: "support.fortanix.com/fortanix-armor-on-premises-key-components"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://support.fortanix.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Key Components

## 1.0 Introduction

This article describes the key components of the Fortanix Armor when deployed in an on-premises environment.

## 2.0 Key Components

### 2.1 Helm

**Helm** (version **4.1 or later**) is used to install and configure the Fortanix Armor deployment. It deploys the **Fortanix Armor Kubernetes Operator** and associated Kubernetes resources into the cluster.

### 2.2 Fortanix Armor Kubernetes Operator

The Fortanix Armor Kubernetes Operator is a controller that runs inside the Kubernetes cluster and manages the lifecycle of Fortanix Armor components.

It is responsible for:

- Deploying Fortanix Armor platform components.
- Managing upgrades.
- Automating internal certificate management within the platform.

### 2.3 Armor Platform Components

The operator deploys and manages the following components:

- **UI Service** – Provides the web interface for Fortanix Armor.
- **API/Backend Services** – Handle platform logic and APIs.
- **Cassandra** – Distributed database used by Fortanix Armor.

These components run as containers created from container images.

### 2.4 Container Images and Registry

All Fortanix Armor components are distributed as container images hosted in a Fortanix-managed container registry. During deployment:

- The Kubernetes cluster pulls these images using registry credentials provided by Fortanix.
- An image pull secret must be configured to enable access.

Customers may optionally mirror these images to an internal container registry, depending on their deployment and security requirements.

### 2.5 Kubernetes Cluster

The Kubernetes cluster provides the execution environment for Fortanix Armor and runs and manages all deployed components.

### 2.6 Supporting Components

The following components must be available in the cluster:

1. **Ingress Controller** – Manages ingress resources used to expose Fortanix Armor UI static assets externally.
2. **cert-manager** – Manages TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates.
3. **SGX Device Plugin** – Enables SGX (Software Guard Extensions) capabilities.

## 3.0 Where to go from here

The prerequisites for installing and deploying Fortanix Armor in a customer-managed Kubernetes environment (on-premises or cloud-hosted) are available [*here*](/v1/docs/fortanix-armor-on-premises-prerequisites).