Today, we are excited to announce the release of Gravity 7.0! Gravity is a tool for developers to package multiple Kubernetes applications into an easily distributable .tar file called a “cluster image”. A cluster image contains everything an application needs and it can be used for quickly creating Kubernetes clusters pre-loaded with applications from scratch or loading applications contained within an image into an existing Kubernetes cluster like OpenShift or GKE.

Teleport 4.2 introduced a new feature called Enhanced Session Recording that takes an unstructured SSH session and outputs a stream of structured events. It’s the next step in Teleport’s evolution that uses new technology (eBPF or now simply known as BPF) to close some gaps in Teleport’s audit abilities. Below you can see an illustration of this feature and if you keep reading, we’ll get into some of the technical details.

We now live in an era where the security of all layers of the software stack is immensely important, and simply open sourcing a code base is not enough to ensure that security vulnerabilities surface and are addressed. At Gravitational, we see it as a necessity to engage a third party that specializes in acting as an adversary, and provide an independent analysis of our sources.

I am not an engineer. I’m a director of human resources. I don’t work in a technical space, but the concept of open source is fascinating to me as it applies to organizational culture. A company like Gravitational that has intentionally chosen open source as a foundation for our work makes not only a technical decision, but a cultural one. We’re finding that employees and candidates care deeply and appreciate our choice. Open source is a big deal for us.

Back in the early 2010s, a Forrester researcher, John Kindervag, noticed that corporations had a binary view of trust and privilege. Once new employees have completed training, they are given full access to all the tools and VPNs needed to get their job done. Once they are logged on, they are trusted completely. Kindervag noticed that “trust” is a vulnerability that can be exploited. Since then, awareness of Zero Trust implementations has grown, in particular Google’s BeyondCorp.

It is likely that at some point in the span of your software engineering career, you will run into an issue that requires poring over audit logs to figure out what went wrong and who did it. This could be to troubleshoot a variety of issues ranging from an unauthorized change that a consultant or vendor made, to bad actors that have gained access to your system.

2019 has been a year of metamorphosis for Gravitational. We started over four years ago as a group of infrastructure engineers who were frustrated with the complexity of cloud application delivery. We wanted cloud apps to be as easy to distribute as desktop software is. It was a big year for our team.

Teleport 4.2 delivers a strong foundation of new features. We have a full list of improvements and fixes attached to our Teleport 4.2.0 GitHub release. Below are a couple of the highlights. Teleport now provides greater visibility into what’s happening during a Teleport session with our Enhanced Session Recording. We’ve also laid the groundwork for a world of possibilities with our enterprise-only Role Escalation via a Workflows API.

This article will be exploring the challenges Gravitational engineers faced when designing a discovery protocol for Teleport and how we learned to channel our inner Gordon Gekko to create a greedy solution. Teleport helps to empower engineers by enabling remote, secure access to their infrastructure while meeting compliance requirements, reducing operational overhead and complete visibility into access and behaviors.