by geoctl | 2025-06-30 06:20:05+00:00
Thank you really for your detailed comment. I will try to answer your questions and please don't hesitate to ask in the Slack/Discord channels or contact emails later if the answers here weren't clear enough to you.

1. Octelium Services and Namespaces are not really related or tied to Kubernetes services and namespaces. Octelium resources in general are defined in protobuf3 and compiled to Golang types, and they are stored as serialized JSON in the Postgres main data store simply as JSONB. That said, Octelium Services in specific are actually deployed on the underlying k8s cluster as k8s services/deployments. Octelium resources visually look like k8s resouces (i.e. they both have the same metadata, spec, status structure), however Octelium resources are completely independent of the underlying k8s cluster; they aren't some k8s CRDs as you might initially guess. Also Octelium has its own API server which do some kind of REST-y gRPC-based operations for the different Octelium resources to the Postgres via an intermediate component called the rscServer. As I said, Octelium and k8s resources are completely separate regardless of the visual YAML resemblance. As for managed containers, you don't really have to use it, it's an optional feature, you can deploy your own k8s services via kubectl/helm and use their hostnames as upstreams for Octelium Services to be protected like any other upstream. Managed containers are meant to automate the entire process of spinning up containers/scaling up and down and eventually cleaning up the underlying k8s pods and deployments once you're done with the owner Octelium Service.

2. Secret management in Octelium is by default stored in plaintext. That's a conscious and deliberate decision as declared in the docs because there isn't any one standard way to encrypt Secrets at rest. Mainline Kubernetes itself does exactly the same and provides a gRPC interface for interceptors to implement their own secret management (e.g. HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS/GCP/Azure offerings, directly to software/hardware-based HSMs, some vault/secret management vendor that I've never heard of, etc...). There is simply no one way to do that, every company has its own regulatory rules, vendors and standards when it comes to secret management at rest. I provided a similar gRPC interface for everybody to intercept such REST operations and implement their own secret management according to their own needs and requirements.

3. Octelium has Session resources https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/management/core/se... Every User can have one or more Sessions, where every Session is represented by an opaque JWT-like access token, which are used internally by the octelium/octeliumctl clients after a successful login, they are also set as a HTTPOnly cookies for BeyondCorp browser-based Sessions and they are used directly as bearer tokens by WORKLOAD Users for client-less access to HTTP-based resources. You can actually set different permissions to different Users and also set different permissions for different Sessions for the exact same User via the owner Credentials or even via your Policies. OAuth2 client credential flow is only intended for WORKLOAD Users. Human Users don't really use OAuth2 client credentials at all. They just login via OIDC/SAML via the web Portal or manually via issued authentication token which is not generally recommended for HUMAN Users. OAuth2 is meant for WORKLOAD Users to securely access HTTP-based Services without using any clients or SDKs. OAuth2 scopes are not really related to zero trust at all as mentioned in the docs. OAuth2 scopes are just an additional way for applications to further restrict their own permissions, not add new ones which are already set by your own Policies.

4. An Octelium Cluster runs on top of a k8s cluster. In a typical multi-node production k8s cluster, you should use at least one node for the control plane and another separate node for the data-plane and scale up if your needs grow. A knowledge with Kubernetes isn't really required to manage an Octelium Cluster. As I mentioned above, Octelium resources and k8s resources are completely separate. One exception when it comes to directly having to deal with the underlying k8s cluster, is setting/updating the Cluster TLS certificate, such cert needs to be fed to the Octelium Cluster via a specific k8s secret as mentioned in the docs. Apart from that, you don't really need to understand anything about the underlying k8s cluster.

5. To explain Octelium more technically from a control plane/data plane perspective: Octelium does with identity-aware proxies similarly to what Kubernetes itself does with containers. It simply builds a whole control plane around the identity-aware proxies which themselves represent and implement the Octelium Services, and automatically deploys them whenever you create an Octelium Service via `octeliumtl apply` commands, scales them up and down whenever you change the Octelium Service replicas and eventually cleans the up whenever you delete the Octelium Service. As I said it's similar to what k8s itself does with containers where your interactions with the k8s API server whether via kubectl or programmatically is enough for the k8s cluster to spin up the containers, do all the CRI/CNI work for you automatically without even having to know or care which node actually runs a specific container.

As for the suggestions:

1. I am not really interested in SaaS offerings myself and you can clearly see that the architecture is meant for self-hosting as opposed to having a separate cloud-based control plane or whatever. I do, however, offer both free and professional support for companies that need to self-host Octelium on their own infrastructure according to their own needs.

2. I am not sure I understand this one. But if I understood you correctly, then as I said above, Octelium resources are completely different and separate from k8s resources regardless of the visual YAML resources. Octelium has its own API server, rscServer, data store, and it does not use CRDs or mess with k8s data store whether it be etcd or something else.