By On March 18, Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) announced a technical preview of its new IC Cloud Support offering for RGS customers, designed specifically to address the challenges faced by government and military customers operating in classified cloud environments.
Organizations and agencies working in classified cloud regions such as AWS or Azure face a fundamentally different operating environment than what they experience in commercial clouds. These classified environments are completely air-gapped by design, with no connectivity to the internet or outside networks, forcing teams to rely on manual processes for moving resources in and out of these environments. In many cases, teams are still burning discs with needed resources, carrying them into a SCIF, and loading them in.
Access management presents another hurdle. In commercial clouds, users typically have the freedom to create and manage their own Identity Access Management (IAM) roles, keys, and secrets to interface with cloud APIs. However, in classified environments, IAM access is often severely restricted or entirely unavailable. This means organizations generally have no ability to create AWS keys or secrets needed to interface with APIs, a requirement for most cloud management tools, including the standard Rancher Government deployment.
Another hurdle is that classified environments use different API endpoints than their commercial counterparts (such as .gov domains instead of .com). These unique endpoints are incompatible with standard libraries and SDKs, forcing teams to write custom code just to handle basic cloud operations. Classified environments also rely on custom certificate authorities and chains of trust that can’t be verified out-of-the-box by browsers or standard tools.
Until now, these limitations have made managing Kubernetes in classified environments a cumbersome, labor-intensive process that lacks the intuitive experience users expect from modern container orchestration platforms.
RGS is overcoming those limitations with its IC Cloud Support offering. This solution brings the familiar Rancher Government experience directly into some of the most secure and isolated cloud environments in the world, the company said.
The core of the solution is a differentiated build of Rancher Government that works with the constraints of classified environments. With IC Cloud Support, when creating clusters in these environments, users can now simply toggle the “Carbide Instance Credential” option in the Rancher Government control panel. This approach eliminates the need for manually managing access and secret keys by using the instance’s own IAM role instead.
This offering is fully compatible with classified API endpoints, allowing Rancher Government to communicate natively with these interfaces without requiring custom code development. More importantly, customers enjoy the same user experience when working in AWS Commercial or AWS GovCloud environments, creating a consistent operational model across all cloud environments.
Source: RGS
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