When most engineers think about rolling out a modern streaming or web application, they visualize a standard cloud-native environment: a global CDN, elastic load balancers, and a continuous pipeline pushing updates to infinite resources. But what happens when your deployment target is an isolated, battery-powered hardware device flying inside a metal tube at 35,000 feet? At AirFi , operating a next-generation In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) platform forced us to completely rethink modern web archi