Open source services from Rafay Systems

Rafay Systems announced its plans to open-source its Zero-Trust Access and GitOps services. Developers will be able to take advantage of and contribute to, these battle-tested services that significantly reduce the complexities associated with securing access to and automating the ongoing operations of Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications. These two services are the first of many that Rafay intends to open source over time.

Zero-Trust Access and GitOps open source services from Rafay Systems

According to the 2020 Cloud Native Foundation Report: 92% of respondents reported using containers in production, a 300% increase from just 23% in the first survey in March 2016. In addition, 91% of respondents report using Kubernetes, 83% of them in production. This continues a steady increase from 78% in 2019 and 58% in 2018.

As Kubernetes has become a priority for enterprises, access to modern infrastructure and configuration management has proven to be a major challenge, particularly when leveraging multiple clouds or operating multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in the same cloud environment. Enterprises are also finding it difficult to enforce repeatable workflows for managing the ongoing operations of Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications. With the Zero-Trust Access and GitOps services available as open-source projects, developers can address the multi-tenant access and automation requirements that these services were built to address. Developers can also collaborate with project contributors to further advance on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge use cases.  

"As a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), we are extremely excited to deepen our engagement with the open-source community. By open-sourcing Zero-Trust Access and GitOps services, we are doing our part in furthering the community's goals of making cloud-native computing ubiquitous. We look forward to the community embracing these projects, and are eager to engage with developers and DevOps professionals who are open to partnering with the current cadre of contributors focused on accelerating Kubernetes adoption in enterprises," said Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay Systems.

Zero-Trust Access Service

Security issues have been a common theme for Kubernetes. In 2020, many large companies experienced security breaches via their Kubernetes infrastructure. Rafay's Zero-Trust Access service enables controlled, audited access for developers, SREs, and automation systems to Kubernetes infrastructure, with just-in-time service account creation and user-level credentials management, and can easily be integrated with an enterprise’s in-place RBAC/SSO solution.

By powering access to Kubernetes infrastructure from anywhere, Rafay's Zero-Trust Access service:

• Centralizes access control to entire fleets of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of where the user or system seeking access is located
• Secures kubectl access to all clusters with integrated enterprise RBAC/SSO
• Ensures compliance with internal security policies and industry regulations
• Provides immutable audit trails of all user and system access

GitOps Service

GitOps is an efficient and effective approach to continuous deployment (CD) that leverages Git as a single source of truth for both infrastructure and applications. By being declarative, it provides for better standardization, enhanced security, and ultimately, improved productivity.

With Rafay's GitOps Service, enterprises can:  

• Programmatically construct multi-stage pipelines for both applications and clusters
• Fully automate deployments and remove error-prone, manual steps
• Guarantee that the desired state specified in your Git repos are instantly enforced on Kubernetes clusters
• Implement easy-to-use controls enabling developers and operations teams to collaborate delivering modern applications faster without sacrificing enterprise-level governance

"Modern infrastructure deserves modern approaches to technical challenges. Managing Kubernetes at scale is not only becoming more challenging and onerous but also comes with great risk," said Hemanth Kavuluru, SVP of Engineering and Operations at Rafay.

"We're always looking for new ways to automate infrastructure and application deployments with security and access control in mind. We look forward to sharing these technical capabilities with the developers and are excited to see how far we can extend these services in partnership with the cloud-native community."