Elastisys Announces General Availability of Welkin
UMEA, Sweden, November 17, 2020 — Elastisys, the World Leader in Kubernetes and Cloud Native Compliance and Regulatory Requirements , announces today that Open Source Welkin is now generally available.
Starting today, interested users will be able to access Welkin and its associated GitHub repositories from compliantkubernetes.io. Welkin is the first Open Source distribution of Kubernetes specifically designed to address HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, PCI-DSS, SOC2 and ISO-27001 requirements and now gives individuals and enterprises a fully Open Source solution to address the growing privacy and regulatory demands facing every company delivering Cloud Native solutions.
Johan Tordsson, co-founder and CTO of Elastisys said:
“I’m extremely proud of the great work done by the contributing engineers, coming together as a team to deliver Welkin. The work that has been done will dramatically simplify the implementation of critical compliance needs while preserving the benefit and agility of Kubernetes.”
Welkin is much more than just Kubernetes. It is a combination of effective open source solutions from the cloud-native community developed to address the key security and access controls needed to meet regulatory compliances. These include:
- Dex: a federated OpenID Connect-compatible identity provider, enabling authentication via, e.g., Active Directory, LDAP, and Google accounts. Dex-issued user identities are used for audit logging and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) purposes throughout Welkin;
- Harbor (with Trivy): a private container image registry with vulnerability scanning capabilities, protecting against known threats;
- Open Policy Agent: a cloud-native policy enforcement software, which Welkin configures to automatically enforce controls from various regulations, protecting against misconfiguration errors; and
- Falco: a configurable intrusion detection system (IDS), protecting against unknown threats and hacking attempts.
For platform and application observability, Welkin packages and configures:
- Fluentd, Elasticsearch, and Kibana: the high-performance fluentd log forwarding agent ships application and audit logs to a highly secured Elasticsearch instance, powered by the fully open source Open Distro for Elasticsearch. Users can work with these logs via the Kibana interface;
- Prometheus, Grafana, and AlertManager: Welkin uses the community standard monitoring stack, in which Prometheus scrapes and stores metrics and Grafana lets operators create dashboards to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPI). AlertManager enables operators to get notified via various integrations when KPIs indicate actionable events or application states.
Welkin additionally packages networking security-related features, such as the Calico networking provider, NGINX as a high-performance traffic ingress controller, and automatic certificate management via cert-manager. Thus, Welkin is a platform built for regulatory compliance from the ground up. It allows users to meet their needs and easily manage their Kubernetes environment across any supported public cloud, private set of virtual machines (VMWare), or bare metal servers.
For customer convenience and peace of mind, Elastisys offers a managed service in public clouds under either US or EU jurisdiction. Tempus AB is a current user of Welkin via Elastisys’ managed services and says:
“We handle very sensitive data. We decided on Elastisys Welkin as it doesn’t lock you into any cloud, is available under European jurisdiction, is built on best practice from the cloud native community and comes pre-configured for all our security and compliance needs, saving us a lot of effort.”
Robert Winter, CEO of Elastisys emphasizes Elastsys’ commitment Open Source:
“Elastisys started the CK8s project because we needed a completely compliant solution to run our Managed Services, but we know the greatest power of Open Source is building a community to share and grow the solution”.
Robert continues:
“We stand ready to help any interested party with our Managed Services and support of CK8s, but we also are excited to nurture a healthy and growing community of Open Source users and contributors.”
About Elastisys
Elastisys develops and manages open source platforms for modern, container based application development. Elastisys is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) member and active contributor to the cloud native community. Elastisys develops the CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution Welkin – a security and compliance focused Kubernetes distribution with a focus on regulatory compliance like GDPR, PCI DSS, HiPAA, SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
Elastisys also offers a complete Compliant Stack of managed services as building blocks for users cloud-native applications. Elastisys managed services including Welkin clusters, databases such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Prometheus and Grafana, and NATS. Our managed services are offered with enterprise grade SLAs and with a regulatory compliance focus on top of select cloud provider partners. With our multi-cloud services, European and US customers can safely keep data in EU-based clouds in compliance with the GDPR. We drive cloud native adoption through meetups, open source contributions and by helping companies on their cloud native journey.
Read more at elastisys.com and compliantkubernetes.com.
