Rancher Government Releases Hauler to Streamline and Accelerate the Transfer of Assets Across Airgap Environments Securely
February 20th, 2024
Rancher Government, the leader in secure Kubernetes and container management solutions, today announced the release of Rancher Government Hauler which dramatically streamlines and simplifies the process of moving assets, artifacts, and applications across the airgap from unclassified to classified environments securely.
Specifically designed to address the unique security and operational demands of the US Government and Military, Rancher Government sought to address the difficult, time and resource consuming process of fetching, packaging, and distributing assets from internet connected environments (typically low-side or unclassified) to disconnected environments (typically hi-side or classified); the result is Rancher Government Hauler.
“At Rancher Government, our mission is to prioritize airgap users as first-class citizens on their cloud-native journey. Acknowledging the inefficiencies of the old approach, which relied heavily on SCIF-dwelling engineers manually creating BASH scripts for the 'sneakernet' process, we wanted to put the process on rails,” said Brandon Gulla, VP and Chief Technology Officer at Rancher Government. “With Hauler, a lightweight tool that transforms the process, we enable our DDIL/airgap customers to accelerate their mission success regardless of the connectivity limitations of their environment.”
An airgap environment is one in which there is an absence of a direct or indirect connection between a computer and the internet, for security reasons. This ensures that the workloads being transferred to classified environments are not infected with malicious code or otherwise compromised. Moving assets across the airgap to classified environments involves a meticulous and highly secure process due to the sensitivity of the data and the need to prevent any unauthorized access or data breaches.
“As an engineer, I'm always working in disconnected environments. I was the one writing and maintaining custom code for moving artifacts across the airgap and it's never easy,” according to Zack Brady, Solutions Architect for the National Security Group at Rancher Government. “Hauler has been a game changer for me and my government customers. It's great to be able to use a single binary to completely transform processes and allow teams to focus on innovating and solving complex problems.”
Collecting assets, artifacts, and applications to cross the airgap domains then validating and distributing them in disconnected environments is a labor intensive and time consuming process that slows down the implementation and adoption of workloads in mission critical situations.
Rancher Government Hauler simplifies and enhances the airgap experience without mandating operators to adhere to a specific workflow. It streamlines this process by treating assets such as container images, helm charts, files, and more as content and collections.
This approach enables operators to effortlessly fetch, store, package, and distribute these assets using declarative configuration files or through the command line.
Following the standards of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), Rancher Government Hauler allows operators to serve these artifacts with an embedded Docker Registry and file server which reduces the dependencies for bootstrapping airgapped and disconnected environments.
Check it out today: https://github.com/rancherfederal/hauler
Want to learn more? View the documentation! https://hauler.dev
About Rancher Government:
Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) is specifically designed to address the unique security and operational needs of the U.S. Government and military as it relates to application modernization, containers, and Kubernetes.
Rancher is a complete open source software stack for teams adopting containers. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters at scale, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.
RGS supports all Rancher products with U.S. based American citizens who are currently supporting programs across the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and civilian agencies.
For Press Inquiries Contact
Don Poole
VP of Corporate Communications,
Rancher Government Solutions
Phone: 914.260.9717
Email: don.poole@rancherfederal.com