Rafay Systems has announced the launch of a new open-source software project named Paralus to enable secure, audited access for developers, operations, SREs and CI/CD tools to remote Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.

Paralus offers access management for developers, architects, and CI/CD tools to remote K8s clusters by consolidating zero-trust access principles such as transaction level authentication and authorization into a single open-source tool. It helps engineering and architecture teams streamline access control for their fleet of K8s clusters spanning different operating environments, different public clouds and K8s distributions, and on-premises data centers operating behind firewalls.

Paralus grants authorized users seamless and secure access to all clusters with a native and familiar kubectl experience by acting as a proxy between the users and systems needing access and the K8s API server. It also addresses one of K8s’ main pain points by eliminating the burden of managing K8s access controls cluster by cluster.

Without Paralus, companies must manually manage access to each cluster using jump hosts or VPNs, and build custom tooling to audit and map all actions performed to a user’s identity – all of which is error-prone and increases the risk of breaches as the number of clusters grows.