Rafay Systems Launches Paralus to Simplify Remote Kubernetes Management
Rafay Systems, a Kubernetes operations platform provider, launched a new open source tool named Paralus which will enable users to manage secure access to Kubernetes from anywhere.
Securing access to remote Kubernetes clusters is a challenge shared by developers, operations and SREs. Paralus addresses this issue by bundling zero-trust access principles such as transaction-level authentication and authorization into one open source tool.
Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, but companies are experiencing challenges related to securing it, says Haseeb Budhani, CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems, in a statement about the launch. Rafay hopes Paralus will help to overcome those challenges.
Paralus allows developers and architects to manipulate Kubernetes clusters without compromising security, which has become a priority for security and DevSecOps teams across the industry.
In May 2022, the Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit security organization, scanned over 450,000 systems and found that more than 84% of them were accessible via the internet. The abundance of weak points in systems hosting Kubernetes poses a threat to organizations everywhere, and Rafay’s newest software project aims to tackle this issue.
“We are excited to open source this technology, submit Paralus to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and assist the broader community in solving this critical access management issue that plagues Kubernetes deployments,” Budhani says in the statement.
By alleviating the need to manually manage access to each cluster using jump hosts or VPNs, Paralus will help companies directly manage role-based access control (RBAC) policies and assignments. Moreover, the product grants seamless integration with identity providers, flexible workflows and automatic logging of all user actions.
Although numerous tools for managing Kubernetes infrastructure exist, Rafay claims its tool offers a new degree of scalability and usability that is consistent even as the number of configured clusters increases. Rafay says Paralus is the first of its kind to use a zero-trust access service to mitigate the issues faced by other Kubernetes management tools.
Although Paralus tackles a complex problem in an unprecedented way, installation “takes around the same time it takes to make a (good) cup of coffee,” according to Rafay Systems.