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Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

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Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#11

Post by solatic »

jmorgan wrote: post #3
candiddevmike wrote: post #2

Why should someone use this instead of Vault, Teleport, or other PAM tools? Does it work with managed Kubernetes offerings like AKS/EKS/GKE?

Thanks for the questions! Vault doesn't have a deep integration to generate credentials for Kubernetes, and Infra plugs in to users' tooling (e.g. kubectl and Kubeconfig) to keep credentials up to date automatically. Infra's different than Teleport in a few ways. Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project. They have a different architecture that invo…

As someone who is a big fan of Teleport, sorry, I just don't get it.

> Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project

Right, and if you're a small team (5-10 people, like you're targeting) you don't really need SSO on the infra layer. It's a nice to have, it's best practice, but the truth is, by the time you really need it (enough engineers that account management is a pain), you typically have the budget for an Enterprise license.

> They have a different architecture that involves deploying a centralized proxy service (whereas Infra verifies credentials at the destination infrastructure vs at a central proxy).

So anyway you need to deploy something central to issue certificates. And anyway, if, to quote you, "We plan to make money by running a managed service version of Infra so teams don’t need to host and upgrade Infra manually.", isn't that the central proxy service? Yet the open-source version avoids it somehow?

> We plan to make money by running a managed service version of Infra so teams don’t need to host and upgrade Infra manually

So you want to sell to teams that a) are too small to afford the license for a product like Teleport Enterprise, b) have enough money that they can afford a premium product above and beyond the free offering provided by their Kubernetes vendor, like https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator (for EKS), c) are willing to install and maintain another agent on their cluster (infra), but aren't willing to install and maintain the central proxy point?

> we've designed Infra around an extensible REST API from the start whereas Teleport uses GRPC.

This isn't really important from a product perspective. For what it's worth, Teleport started with a REST API; they moved to gRPC because, if I recall correctly, gRPC helped them scale to support larger infrastructure better.

If you're launching a competing product to Teleport, which is now by far the most mature product in the space, then currently, at least from where I'm sitting, you aren't offering sufficient added value compared to the incumbent offerings, which also include CloudFlare Access, Checkpoint Harmony Connect SASE, Hashicorp Boundary (their offerings aren't quite Kubernetes native, but it's the same idea)...

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#12

Post by tessier0ashpool »

alexk wrote: post #10
jmorgan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the questions! Vault doesn't have a deep integration to generate credentials for Kubernetes, and Infra plugs in to users' tooling (e.g. kubectl and Kubeconfig) to keep credentials up to date automatically. Infra's different than Teleport in a few ways. Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project. They have a different architecture that invo…

Sasha, CTO@Teleport here. Congrats on the launch! RE: Teleport design Teleport does not require a centralized proxy, because it is based on certificate authorities. You can issue a certificate with or without Teleport proxy and access any cluster that trusts that certificate directly. Because of this design you can have a completely decentralized system, with cold storage for your CA, HSM or any parallel system issui…

this looks like a centralized proxy to me: https://goteleport.com/docs/architecture/proxy/

are you saying that because you can have multiple proxies, they aren't centralized? or that at least this is one mode you can use, but the standard one is using a proxy?

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#13

Post by jmorgan »

alexk wrote: post #10
jmorgan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the questions! Vault doesn't have a deep integration to generate credentials for Kubernetes, and Infra plugs in to users' tooling (e.g. kubectl and Kubeconfig) to keep credentials up to date automatically. Infra's different than Teleport in a few ways. Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project. They have a different architecture that invo…

Sasha, CTO@Teleport here. Congrats on the launch! RE: Teleport design Teleport does not require a centralized proxy, because it is based on certificate authorities. You can issue a certificate with or without Teleport proxy and access any cluster that trusts that certificate directly. Because of this design you can have a completely decentralized system, with cold storage for your CA, HSM or any parallel system issui…

Great point on GRPC having better support for event streaming! We originally built Infra to have a GRPC API, but many users we spoke to didn't yet have load balancers or ingress controllers that supported the GRPC protocol (e.g. one user had to consider upgrading their AWS Load Balancer controller to put Infra behind it).

We wanted to remove as many hurdles as possible for teams to deploy Infra in their environments. Event streaming will invariably become an important part of the API (e.g. for features like audit logs), and we'll consider GRPC again for internal components of Infra.

RE using Teleport without the proxy, how would a target cluster's Kubernetes API server (e.g. an EKS cluster) verify certificates without Teleport's proxy?

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#14

Post by solatic »

jmorgan wrote: post #13
alexk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sasha, CTO@Teleport here. Congrats on the launch! RE: Teleport design Teleport does not require a centralized proxy, because it is based on certificate authorities. You can issue a certificate with or without Teleport proxy and access any cluster that trusts that certificate directly. Because of this design you can have a completely decentralized system, with cold storage for your CA, HSM or any parallel system issui…

Great point on GRPC having better support for event streaming! We originally built Infra to have a GRPC API, but many users we spoke to didn't yet have load balancers or ingress controllers that supported the GRPC protocol (e.g. one user had to consider upgrading their AWS Load Balancer controller to put Infra behind it). We wanted to remove as many hurdles as possible for teams to deploy Infra in their environments.…

> one user had to consider upgrading their AWS Load Balancer controller to put Infra behind it

Huh?

The AWS load balancer for which gRPC is relevant is their Application Load Balancer (ALB), which would require you to terminate TLS at the ALB and does not support mutual TLS (which is how short-lifetime client certificates work in this case). To the best of my knowledge, you can't pass through a client-key-encrypted gRPC session through an ALB (maybe I'm wrong?).

Typically this requires an NLB, which will treat all TCP traffic (REST and gRPC) the same, so gRPC wouldn't require an upgrade?

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#15

Post by mchiang »

solatic wrote: post #11
jmorgan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the questions! Vault doesn't have a deep integration to generate credentials for Kubernetes, and Infra plugs in to users' tooling (e.g. kubectl and Kubeconfig) to keep credentials up to date automatically. Infra's different than Teleport in a few ways. Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project. They have a different architecture that invo…

As someone who is a big fan of Teleport, sorry, I just don't get it. > Teleport doesn't provide identity provider integrations beyond GitHub (e.g. Okta) in their open source project Right, and if you're a small team (5-10 people, like you're targeting) you don't really need SSO on the infra layer. It's a nice to have, it's best practice, but the truth is, by the time you really need it (enough engineers that account…

hey, thank you for the comments.

We plan to build a managed service to provide a 'centralized experience'. This is where, we'd issue certificates/tokens for the users & machines. That being said, many of our users want to make sure that should Infra's server go down, their access will continually work for a configured time-interval. This is why we validate the credentials on the destination side.

Regarding gRPC, we actually started with that, and based on feedback to work with users' systems added REST API support.

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#16

Post by alexk »

tessier0ashpool wrote: post #12
alexk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sasha, CTO@Teleport here. Congrats on the launch! RE: Teleport design Teleport does not require a centralized proxy, because it is based on certificate authorities. You can issue a certificate with or without Teleport proxy and access any cluster that trusts that certificate directly. Because of this design you can have a completely decentralized system, with cold storage for your CA, HSM or any parallel system issui…

this looks like a centralized proxy to me: https://goteleport.com/docs/architecture/proxy/ are you saying that because you can have multiple proxies, they aren't centralized? or that at least this is one mode you can use, but the standard one is using a proxy?

Teleport consists of a couple of components:

* Proxy is used to handle SSO, Web UI and intercept traffic for session capture. You can have one proxy per your organization, multiple proxies or, if you don't want to intercept traffic, no proxies at all.

* Auth server is used to issue certificates and send audit logs and session recordings to external systems.

* Nodes (end system agents) sometimes are helpful, but not required. For example, if you want to capture system calls in your SSH session, you can deploy node. Or you can use OpenSSH with Teleport if you wish.

Because Teleport is based on certificate authorities, the following deployments are possible:

* One, "centralized" HA pair of proxies intercepting all your traffic (K8s, databases, web, etc). This is actually helpful for many cases, as you have just one entry point in your system to protect, vs many.

* Multiple, "decentralized" proxies in multiple datacenters. This is helpful for large organizations with many datacenters all over the world.

* No proxies at all. You can issue certificates with or without Teleport and reach your target clusters directly, as long as they trust the CA. It's a bit harder for managed K8s, but easy to do with self-hosted K8s, SSH, Databases, etc that support mTLS cert auth. This is super helpful for integrations with larger echo system - any system that supports cert auth should work with Teleport out of the box.

* You can have one auth server HA pair managing a single certificate authority.

* You can have multiple, independent auth servers (teleport clusters) with certificate authorities and trust established between them.

* You can use your own CA tooling with Teleport.

The way we think about Teleport is that it's a combination of certificate authority management system, proxies (intercepting traffic and recording sessions) and nodes (for some services, like SSH providing advanced auditing capabilities with BPF).

You can combine those components, or replace them with whatever makes sense.

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#17

Post by alexk »

jmorgan wrote: post #13
alexk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sasha, CTO@Teleport here. Congrats on the launch! RE: Teleport design Teleport does not require a centralized proxy, because it is based on certificate authorities. You can issue a certificate with or without Teleport proxy and access any cluster that trusts that certificate directly. Because of this design you can have a completely decentralized system, with cold storage for your CA, HSM or any parallel system issui…

Great point on GRPC having better support for event streaming! We originally built Infra to have a GRPC API, but many users we spoke to didn't yet have load balancers or ingress controllers that supported the GRPC protocol (e.g. one user had to consider upgrading their AWS Load Balancer controller to put Infra behind it). We wanted to remove as many hurdles as possible for teams to deploy Infra in their environments.…

Re: GRPC

My bet that you'd migrate to GRPC eventually as you scale :) I like the simplicity of HTTPS/JSON API as well, but it just broke down for us at a certain scale point.

Re: Teleport with EKS

True, CNCF clusters support mTLS out of the box, but EKS hides the endpoint and does not let you provision CA to trust. You will have to run teleport proxy inside the EKS cluster to translate mTLS to EKS IAM auth. However, you don't have to have a centralized proxy, you can just deploy Teleport proxy agent in each cluster and hide your K8s endpoint.

You also don't have to have a single Teleport proxy to do that.

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#18

Post by tessier0ashpool »

alexk wrote: post #16
tessier0ashpool wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this looks like a centralized proxy to me: https://goteleport.com/docs/architecture/proxy/ are you saying that because you can have multiple proxies, they aren't centralized? or that at least this is one mode you can use, but the standard one is using a proxy?

Teleport consists of a couple of components: * Proxy is used to handle SSO, Web UI and intercept traffic for session capture. You can have one proxy per your organization, multiple proxies or, if you don't want to intercept traffic, no proxies at all. * Auth server is used to issue certificates and send audit logs and session recordings to external systems. * Nodes (end system agents) sometimes are helpful, but not r…

does the standard deployment use a centralized proxy?

like it's your Basic Architecture in the diagram in your docs. so i feel like i'm being put on.

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#19

Post by alexk »

tessier0ashpool wrote: post #18
alexk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teleport consists of a couple of components: * Proxy is used to handle SSO, Web UI and intercept traffic for session capture. You can have one proxy per your organization, multiple proxies or, if you don't want to intercept traffic, no proxies at all. * Auth server is used to issue certificates and send audit logs and session recordings to external systems. * Nodes (end system agents) sometimes are helpful, but not r…

does the standard deployment use a centralized proxy? like it's your Basic Architecture in the diagram in your docs. so i feel like i'm being put on.

Sorry you feel that way!

We haven't counted, but my bet is that most smaller deployments just use the single proxy.

I also know that most larger deployments use multi-DC and multi-cluster design with independent CAs for availability and latency.

Re: Launch HN: Infra (YC W21) – Open-source access management for Kubernetes

#20

Post by cxj22 »

I work at a company that provides a SaaS platform for running Kubernetes clusters across edge, private and public clouds, and IAM for cloud infrastructure is a massive issue. My team and I have spent significant amounts of time digging into this issue and connected with infra over 12 months ago. This as a two layer problem; provide consistency across clouds for DevOps and platform teams, and ease of use for users.

Infra is solving this very complex issue by addressing both and I like the approach the team has taken.

Simplifying IAM for platform teams whilst importantly maintaining native controls such as RBAC with multiple clusters using a single distribution of Kubernetes is crucial. Any layer on top of Kubernetes RBAC makes it impossible to remain open and portable. Solving this across different clouds, be it the hyperscale providers or any on-prem DIY, is even more complex, OIDC is one example.

Further, issues arise when you want to provide developers self-service access to clusters. Current in-market options are limited or require separate tools for separate clouds, AWS IAM for example, or result in further in-house/DIY development.

Can't wait to see where this goes next.

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