POC Environments

A POC (proof-of-concept) runs the entire Confident AI stack on a single machine with Docker Compose, using the confident-compose repository. It bundles the app together with its Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, and object storage, so you can try the product against your own data before provisioning any cloud infrastructure.

Self-hosting, including POC environments, is available on Enterprise plans. Talk to the platform team to get access to confident-compose, the container images, and a license key.

A POC is for evaluation, not production. Everything runs on one host with no high availability, no backups, and single-container datastores. When you are ready to go live, move to a cloud deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure.

What you need

  • A host with Docker and Docker Compose: a laptop, a VM, or an on-prem server.
  • From Confident AI: access to the confident-compose repository, credentials to pull the container images, and a CONFIDENT_LICENSE_KEY. Ask the platform team for all three.
  • An LLM provider key (for example OPENAI_API_KEY) if you want to run evaluations.

Deploy

1

Clone confident-compose

Once Confident AI has granted access:

$git clone https://github.com/confident-ai/confident-compose
$cd confident-compose
2

Configure the environment

Copy the example environment file and fill it in:

$cp .env.example .env

Set your CONFIDENT_LICENSE_KEY, your LLM provider key, and the image registry login Confident AI gave you. The repository README lists every variable and its default.

3

Start the stack

$docker compose up -d

This brings up the app along with Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse, and object storage on the single host. Give it a minute to become healthy:

$docker compose ps
4

Open the app

Open http://localhost:3000 and sign in. To reach it from elsewhere, put it behind your existing VPN or an internal load balancer.

Limitations

A POC trades production hardening for speed:

  • No high availability. One host, no failover, no redundancy.
  • Datastores are not production-grade. Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse run as single containers with no backups or replication.
  • No persistence guarantees. Data lives with the containers unless you configure volumes.
  • Reduced surface. Managed secrets, managed Redis, and the cloud code executor are not part of a Compose setup.

Moving to production

When the POC has proven the fit, deploy on your cloud. Each guide provisions managed Kubernetes, a managed database, backed-up storage, keyless identity, and horizontal scaling.

Deploy on AWS
Deploy on GCP
Deploy on Azure