Launching Otterize Cloud Beta

I’m at the airport on my way to Seattle as I write this, excited about joining the cloud-native security community at the SecurityCon event tomorrow. And it occurred to me that it’s not just Kubernetes developers who are expecting everything to be more declarative — it’s hundreds of millions of people, especially given the pandemic we just went through. Online went big, and with it the expectations: if I order through my phone Pad Thai delivered for lunch, I just declare what I want to eat, and soon enough the food just arrives. I don’t have to message the kitchen to prepare it, I don’t have to message a delivery company to deliver it, I don’t have to tell my bank to pay for it. I declare the outcome, and tech figures out how to make it happen.

With intent-based access control, that’s how developers let their apps access the services they need, securely. They simply declare what calls their apps need to make, using client intents files; and then tech configures all the existing access controls to allow declared access while closing down all other access.

For Kubernetes, that tech is Otterize OSS. It works entirely within your Kubernetes cluster, receiving ClientIntents YAMLs through kubectl apply, and automatically managing network policies, Kafka ACLs, and mTLS certificates to authorize declared access while locking out undeclared access.

Tomorrow, we’re launching the next piece of the puzzle: Otterize Cloud. It’s a service we’ve built to provide you visibility, confidence, and operational insights on top of the Otterize OSS running in your cluster. It’s entirely optional — Otterize OSS works perfectly well standalone — and indeed Otterize Cloud only reads information, rather than writing anything to the cluster. But it turns out that visibility and insights can be pretty important too, whether you’re just getting comfortable with this almost-too-easy way to manage access, or you’re looking to implement it across your environments in a controlled, don’t-surprise-me manner.

An analogy comes to mind — please bear with me. I think at this point I can back out of my garage pretty much with my eyes closed. But I don’t. I have proximity sensors, I have cameras, I have mirrors, and I still turn my head this way and that to make sure I don’t hit anything. The happy path is great, but a bit of visibility and assurance go a long way towards lowering my blood pressure.

So tomorrow at SecurityCon we launch Otterize Cloud. It’ll be in closed beta for a little while, until we tweak the onboarding experience, add some more docs, and tweak a few things to polish a really dev-friendly experience. It won’t be there for long, because what we really need is the feedback from all of our community. If you’re willing to give us that kind of feedback now, even before those tweaks, we’d love to have you: just request an invite to the closed beta , grab a cup of coffee, and your invite will be on the way.

Time to board. See you in the Cloud!