We recently had the incredible opportunity to showcase Paralus at KubeCon EU 2024, and let us tell you, it was an experience like no other. In just two years since the inception, Paralus has been part of the major KubeCons and has been garnering interest from individuals and organizations alike.

Introduction​

The world of Kubernetes has evolved rapidly, transforming the way organizations manage containerized applications. In this age of dynamic workloads and cloud-native architecture, security, and access control are paramount. Argo CD and Paralus are two powerful tools that have emerged to address these concerns, enabling organizations to implement zero-trust principles in their Kubernetes environments. In this blog, we'll explore the concepts behind Argo CD and Paralus and delve into their integration for zero-trust Kubernetes access.

In late Sep 2023, we had the opportunity to speak, present and participate at DevOpsCon 2023 in New York City. In this blog, we will briefly describe what we presented at the conference and our observations about the event itself.

DevOpsCon is a global conference focused on CI/CD, Kubernetes Ecosystem, Agile & Lean Business. If you live outside the United States, you may want to attend one of their conferences in other cities such as Munich, Singapore, London and Berlin.

Organizations today need to efficiently manage resources, ensure security, and foster innovation—all within shared environments. MultiTenancyCon, a co-located event at KubeCon is where the brightest minds in the industry come together to address these challenges head-on.

Organizations today need to efficiently manage resources, ensure security, and foster innovation—all within shared environments. MultiTenancyCon, a co-located event at KubeCon is where the brightest minds in the industry come together to address these challenges head-on.

Modern IT infrastructures are becoming more dynamic and resilient with the passing years. Containers, for example, have revolutionized the way IT organizations develop, deploy and manage applications.

While container management and orchestration seem to be the way to go nowadays, one of the key pain points is once we have the clusters and applications deployed, how do we guard our ever-growing ecosystem internally and externally?

Securing Kubernetes and cluster access management is complicated, but following the zero trust principles, you can ensure that only verified and authorized requests can have access to the information. As part of creating awareness around securing Kubernetes with zero trust principles, I recently gave a talk around this topic at Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru 2023 that you can also watch. This blog post is based on my talk. Here, we will cover various aspects related to zero trust security and access management with Kubernetes with a practical application.

Introduction​

Managing Kubernetes clusters at scale can be a daunting task, especially when dealing with multiple clusters and the need to federate access and manage RBAC for a group of developers. However, the integration of two open-source projects, Kamaji and Paralus, provides an innovative solution to address these challenges. In this blog post, we will explore how Kamaji's Kubernetes-in-Kubernetes approach and Paralus' centralized RBAC and authentication features work together seamlessly to simplify cluster management, enhance security, and streamline RBAC operations.

With over 150 speakers and 20,000 attendees PlatformCon 2023, the virtual conference created by and for platform engineers was a hub of activity and excitement for tech enthusiasts and industry professionals alike. Team Paralus was also a part of such a vibrant community for the second edition of PlatformCon.

This event brought together a global community of techies, developers, and platform engineers to share the latest advancements and trends in the field of platform engineering.

The event also featured a diverse range of talks ranging from platform-culture, platform-blueprint, platform-impact to platform-stories. You can watch all the sessions on the Platform Engineering YouTube Channel.

Applications today have become advanced and complex. They can perform simple tasks like adding up two numbers to controlling a rocket in space. Irrespective of what the application does, ensuring that the application and the underlying infrastructure is safe and secured is critical.

So as teams and organizations build applications, we want to ensure that their infrastructure is secured. That was one of the reasons we came up with Paralus. We went a step further and donated it to the CNCF to help the community and also in turn build Paralus.

June 28, 2022, was an extremely special day for all of us here at Paralus. It was the day when Paralus was born. The day when we presented Paralus to the world. A lot of tools exist today for managing Kubernetes access. From the default role-based access control mechanism to custom DIY solutions along with a few open-source projects. However, most of these tools aren't easy to configure especially when it comes to individual clusters.