This will allow developers to capitalise and contribute to these services that reduce complexities associated with securing access to and automating the ongoing operations of Kubernetes infrastructure and applications. These two services are the first of many that Rafay Systems intends to open source over time.

According to the 2020 Cloud Native Foundation Report, 92% of respondents were reported using containers in production—a 300% surge from just 23% in the first survey of March 2016.

In addition, 91% of respondents report using Kubernetes, 83% of them in production. This continues to increase from 78% in 2019 and 58% in 2018.

As Kubernetes has become a priority for enterprises, access to infrastructure and configuration management has proven to be a 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 applications. With the Zero-Trust Access and GitOps services available as open source projects, developers can address multi-tenant access and automation requirements.

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,” explains Rafay Systems CEO Haseeb Budhani.

“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,” enthuses Budhani.

Zero-Trust Access Service
Security issues have been a common theme for Kubernetes. In 2020, 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, Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access service includes:

• Centralises 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 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 standardisation, enhanced security, and 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 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,” concludes Rafay Systems senior vice president of engineering and operations Hemanth Kavuluru. “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.”

Rafay is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is a Certified Kubernetes Service Provider.