CI/CD for Licensed Software You Don't Host

We are three weeks away from shipping NavEngine v4, an echo from the previous piece on Business Driven development. I say "shipping" loosely. There is no deployment script I run, no SSH session I open and no Kubernetes rollout I watch. The software lives on infrastructure I have never seen, behind firewalls I cannot reach, on machines whose specs I do not know. Shipping, in this context, means pushing an image to a registry and trusting that a process running inside a container on a customer's server will eventually notice and do something about it. That gap - between what I push and what the customer runs - is what this piece is about. The Assumption Collapse Every CI/CD tool I have ever used was built on a premise so foundational that nobody thought to state it: you control the deployment target. You own the server. You have the keys. Deployment, in the conventional sense, is just automation wrapped around access you already have. NavEngine is quite the opposite. It exists as a custo