Legacy data vendors used to warn customers against moving workloads to the cloud, saying it was unsafe. Today, cloud providers have invested in technology and processes that make cloud storage and processing as secure as, or even safer than, traditional on-premises setups.
Still, some data workloads are too sensitive, costly, or require strict data sovereignty, so they can’t run in public clouds.
By 2025, experts predict that enterprises will split their processing between public clouds and on-premises, private, or edge environments. Hybrid data processing is becoming the norm.
How can you set up this kind of hybrid system? Building it yourself can take a lot of time and money, but Tower makes it much easier.
Launching Self-Hosted Runners
Tower is now launching Self-Hosted Runners that work with many hardware architectures. You can download and install a Tower Runner on your VM, server, desktop, or any other infrastructure you use. This gives you access to execution, orchestration, observability, and other Tower features. Installation packages are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and there is also a Docker image for those who want a containerized option.
Self-hosting is not limited to on-premises use. You can also deploy Tower Runners in your own cloud account, so your sensitive data stays within your cloud VPC boundary.
Download your Runner installer today!
Use cases for Self-Hosted Runners
We created Self-Hosted Runners to support customers with strict privacy and data residency requirements. Many organizations need to keep their information within their own infrastructure, either on-premises or in their own cloud accounts.
Key use cases include:
Regulated or highly sensitive data processing: Healthcare, legal, and finance teams often must follow compliance rules or internal policies that require data to remain on-premises or in customer-owned cloud accounts, especially for PHI/PII or other confidential records.
Private AI workloads: Companies that run language models on proprietary data, such as internal chats, customer conversations, or R&D documents, use self-hosting to keep sensitive prompts and outputs from being sent to external services.
Data-sovereignty environments: Global enterprises may need to keep data within a certain country, region, or isolated network. Self-hosted runners allow them to process data where it already resides, without crossing infrastructure boundaries.
Check out the Tower Architecture guide to learn more about how Tower separates orchestration and user management from data processing.
“Inflow supports customers with sensitive data workloads that must remain on-premises, leveraging a diverse ecosystem of data tools, including Sling Data, dbt, Pentaho, and others, to choose the best fit for each use case. Tower’s self-hosted runners allowed us to consolidate a subset of our customers into a single managed environment, providing a true single pane of glass for observability and a simple, reliable way to deploy and update customer pipelines.”
- Itamar Steinberg, CEO of Inflow Systems
How to enable Self-Hosted Runners in Tower
You can enable self-hosted runners for each Team in Team Settings. To organize your applications and runners, create multiple Teams and use Team API keys to control which runners run which apps.
Before you enable this feature, download the self-hosted runner that matches your operating system and architecture. We provide binaries for x86_64 and aarch64 on all major operating systems, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux, macOS, and Windows.
After you have the correct runner, you can enable Self-Hosted Runners in your Team account:
Step 1: Toggle the Self-hosted Runner mode in the Tower app under Team Settings.
Step 2: Start the Tower Runner in your chosen environment as a separate process or as a Windows or Linux service.
Step 3: Monitor your connected Self-Hosted Runners on the Settings page or by checking the Runner executable output.
Download the runners and set up your first Self-Hosted Runner today. Visit the documentation for download links and a step-by-step guide to get started in your environment.