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.

It’s a great day for all of us in the Paralus community as Paralus is now listed as a 1-click app on the DigitalOcean marketplace. You’ve seen in the past how easy it is to install Paralus on various environments, right from public cloud platforms like Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, Google GKE to your own laptop using Micro K8s and Kind.

However, with the launch of Paralus 1-click app on DigitalOcean marketplace, it’s even easier for you to try Paralus. In fact, we recommend using this 1-click offering to try Paralus quickly. So how does it work? Read on to learn more.

Kubernetes is the most widely used container orchestration tool. To make our applications scalable & flexible, it employs numerous components, layers & services. And with so many interfaces, we have a large attack area and thus security becomes a concern.

Makers and maintainers of Kubernetes realized that and focused on providing some sort of security mechanism to secure Kubernetes clusters. Today, Kubernetes provides essential security features like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) out of the box. In fact it took almost 3 years for the RBAC feature to be available after Kubernetes’ release.

In the last few years, organizations across the spectrum have seen changes in the way they work. Digital Transformation took the center stage and revamped the way employees worked. For many of us, our workplace was a 5x5 cubicle, but now it can be a beach, a hillock or even a treehouse. While that has brought joy for most of us, it was a nightmare for the CIOs and Infosec folks who were worried about the safety and security of their infrastructure.

With employees using their devices and network to connect to organization's infrastructure, there was a high risk involved. The existing security mechanisms that were in place were obsolete and there was a call for more robust security and access mechanisms.

One of the best things that comes with Paralus is that it can be easily deployed to virtually any Kubernetes cluster. We have shown that in our previous blog posts where we deployed Paralus on GKE, Kind and even MicroK8s.

In this blog post, we'll take you through the steps to setup Paralus on Digital Ocean (DO) using a custom domain and import a local cluster into it. Let's get started!

Organizations today are focusing a lot on scalability and flexibility of their applications. Most of the age-old monolith applications are now being converted to more modern and agile microservices which reside in containers.

As more and more applications are containerized, orchestration tools like Kubernetes are at the helm. However, with every new resource addition, there's an overhead. And the one that we are going to focus on today is access management for Kubernetes.

The concept of safety and security have been prevalent from the early days of human existence. Back in the day, watch towers and sentries were a way for kings to keep a watch on their surroundings.

In the modern day setup, information security is a bigger challenge than physical security. Confidential & sensitive data runs into petabytes and it becomes all the more important to safeguard not only the data but the entire infrastructure.

In the previous blog posts we showed how you can set up Paralus on various cloud based Kubernetes clusters like Azure, AWS and GCP. We also shared a tutorial on setting up Paralus on a Kind cluster.

All these posts have helped people get started with Paralus. However, there have been requests for details on how to set up Paralus on MicroK8s cluster. In this blog post, we do exactly that.

Kubectl is one of the most widely used tools to work with Kubernetes. The command line tool allows you to deploy applications, inspect and manage resources. It basically authenticates with the control plane for your cluster and makes API calls to the Kubernetes API. In short if you are working with Kubernetes - you will use kubectl the most.

In most modern day scenarios, there are multiple users who are accessing various clusters. This makes it all more important to ensure that every user or group has access to only those resources that they are allowed to. Few ways to achieve this is using namespaces and role based access control. While these are good, most enterprise grade application deployments require something more robust.