Your VPC. Your weights. Zero egress.

No. The deployment enforces a default-deny egress policy at the subnet level. Candidate, employee, ticket, deal, and decision data is read through from your source systems (ATS, HRIS, CRM, ticketing, calendar, performance database) and never copied out of your cloud account. Inference request bodies, scored responses, and decision traces all stay in-cluster. The only opt-in traffic that ever leaves is aggregate operational telemetry with every PII field scrubbed server-side before it is emitted, and that opt-in can be turned off in Terraform.

You do. The weights artifact is delivered into a bucket you own, encrypted with a KMS key you hold. The NODES service role has read access, scoped to the cluster; the artifact cannot be exported. Revoke the KMS key and inference stops, which is what every customer tests on Day 07 of deployment.

No. NODES fine-tunes an open-source foundation model with a pinned digest; there is no call out to a hosted LLM provider at training, fine-tune, or inference time. The DPA lists zero external subprocessors for model operations. This is the question that stalls most vendor reviews; here, it is answered by the deployment topology, not by policy.

In-cluster, on your data, on a quarterly cadence, producing a new signed weights artifact that lives only in your VPC. Retrain jobs run under the NODES service role with scoped IAM. NODES does not pull your data back to retrain a shared model. There is no shared model. Your weights are yours.

The deployment keeps running. The weights are in your bucket under your KMS key. The inference binary is in your cluster. The Terraform module and Helm chart are pinned in your CI. A source-escrow clause in the master agreement gives you the right to rebuild the binary from source after a triggering event. "Lights-on without NODES" is a stated design goal.

To your HRIS or ATS, never to NODES. Because candidate and employee records live in your source-of-truth systems and are read through into NODES only at scoring time, a delete or export request fulfilled in your HRIS is automatically reflected in NODES on the next read. Decision traces bound to deleted subjects are tombstoned on the same schedule.

Yes. The Terraform module runs in AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, and GCP Assured Workloads out of the box. For air-gapped environments NODES ships weights, binaries, and the Helm chart as signed offline artifacts. Retrains are triggered by a scheduled job inside the air-gapped cluster, with no return path. Talk to the architecture review team for the offline delivery process.