Architecture & data flow - Hilt Documentation

Hilt deploys as a single-tenant platform inside your own cloud account. Collectors, the ingest endpoint, the streaming buffer, the analytics database, and the dashboard all run in infrastructure Hilt provisions in your account. No platform component is shared across customers, and no component is exposed to the public internet by default.

Deployment model

One tenant per account. Each customer receives a dedicated deployment in their own AWS account, GCP project, Azure subscription, or Ali Cloud account. There is no shared multi-tenant plane and no Hilt-side copy of your data.
Provisioned with Terraform. Hilt applies a Terraform configuration to create the platform infrastructure (compute, streaming, database, storage, and private networking) in the account you nominate.
You grant scoped access. You provide a target account with the agreed IAM (or RAM) permissions per the deployment guide. Hilt operates within that scope.

For cloud-specific provisioning and IAM detail, see the deployment guides: AWS, GCP, Azure, and Ali Cloud.

Components

A deployment is made up of these logical components, all inside your account:

Component	Role
Collectors	Agents on your hosts that produce metadata-level telemetry (Linux static binary, macOS managed agent)
Ingest endpoint	Private link endpoint that terminates collector connections; the only inbound path
Streaming buffer	Durable event stream that decouples ingest from processing
Enrichment and scoring	Workloads that normalize, enrich, and score events, and evaluate model drift
Analytics database	Column store that holds normalized telemetry and findings
Dashboard	Web application for investigation, detection rules, and administration, reached over private networking
Export pipeline	Core component; produces anonymized exports on a daily schedule for your review and approval

Per-cloud services

The component roles above map to native managed services on each cloud. All variants keep traffic inside your account with no public internet exposure.

Role	AWS	GCP	Azure	Ali Cloud
Platform compute (ingest, dashboard)	ECS Fargate	GKE	AKS	ACK
Platform compute (enrichment, classification)	EKS	GKE	AKS	ACK
Event streaming	MSK (Kafka)	Kafka (in-cluster KRaft)	Event Hubs	Message Queue for Apache Kafka
Private ingest	PrivateLink	HTTPS Gateway (`*.hilt.ai`)	Private Link	HTTPS ingress (`*.hilt.ai`)
Analytics database	ClickHouse (EC2 instance)	ClickHouse Cloud	ClickHouse (Azure VM)	ClickHouse Cloud
Dashboard database	RDS (PostgreSQL)	Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL)	Azure Database for PostgreSQL	ApsaraDB RDS (PostgreSQL)
Object storage	S3	Cloud Storage	Blob Storage	OSS
TLS and DNS	ACM, Route 53	Certificate Manager	ingress-nginx + Kubernetes TLS	ingress-nginx + Let’s Encrypt (`*.hilt.ai`)
Service identity	IAM roles	Workload Identity	Managed Identity	RAM roles

Network boundaries

Ingest. On AWS and Azure, collectors connect to a private link endpoint (PrivateLink / Private Link) in your account. On GCP v1, collectors reach {name}-ingest.hilt.ai over Certificate Manager HTTPS Gateways; see GCP. On Ali Cloud, collectors reach {name}-ingest.hilt.ai over HTTPS through the cluster ingress; see Ali Cloud.
No inbound internet. No platform component accepts inbound connections from the public internet.
Controlled outbound. Outbound internet access is used only where needed for container image pulls, and is configurable to use private registries.
Single collector destination. A collector has exactly one outbound destination: the ingest endpoint, over HTTPS on TCP/443. DNS resolves inside your VPC through a private zone, so no DNS query leaks to public resolvers.

For the collector’s outbound posture, airgapped operation, and privilege model, see Networking and security.

Data flow

Events travel one direction, from your hosts into your analytics store and dashboard, without leaving your account.

  YOUR CLOUD ACCOUNT
  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │                                                                       │
  │   Hosts                                                               │
  │   ┌──────────────┐                                                    │
  │   │  Collector   │  metadata events                                   │
  │   │ (Linux/macOS)│ ──────────────┐                                    │
  │   └──────────────┘   HTTPS 443    │                                   │
  │                      (private link)│                                  │
  │                                    ▼                                  │
  │                          ┌──────────────────┐                        │
  │                          │  Ingest endpoint  │                       │
  │                          └─────────┬─────────┘                       │
  │                                    ▼                                  │
  │                          ┌──────────────────┐                        │
  │                          │ Streaming buffer  │  (Kafka)             │
  │                          └─────────┬─────────┘                       │
  │                                    ▼                                  │
  │                          ┌──────────────────┐                        │
  │                          │  Enrichment and   │                       │
  │                          │     scoring       │                       │
  │                          └─────────┬─────────┘                       │
  │                                    ▼                                  │
  │                          ┌──────────────────┐      ┌──────────────┐  │
  │                          │ Analytics database│◀────▶│  Dashboard   │  │
  │                          │   (ClickHouse)    │      │(private ALB¹) │  │
  │                          └─────────┬─────────┘      └──────────────┘  │
  │                                    ┊                                  │
  │                                    ┊ anonymized, approved             │
  │                                    ▼                                  │
  │                          ┌──────────────────┐                        │
  │                          │  Export pipeline  │ ┄┄▶ to Hilt (approved)│
  │                          │  (daily schedule) │                       │
  │                          └──────────────────┘                        │
  │                                                                       │
  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

¹ “Private ALB” is AWS-specific; GCP, Azure, and Ali Cloud use Kubernetes ingress load balancers. The dotted path is the only route by which any data leaves your account, and — with approval enabled (the default) — nothing is transferred until you approve each export. See Data collection and handling for what flows through this pipeline and Anonymized data export for the export controls.

Service names vary by cloud (for example, the streaming buffer is MSK on AWS and in-cluster Kafka on GCP), but the data flow and trust boundary are identical: telemetry stays in your account.

Data residency

Telemetry does not leave your cloud account. Hilt does not receive, mirror, or hold out-of-band access to your events. The single exception is the anonymized data export, a core pipeline that transfers only anonymized statistical features after your review and approval.