The balance between modernizing IT infrastructure and preserving existing investments presents a major concern for the U.S. Government. Tricia Fitzmaurice, Vice President of Sales at Rancher Government Solutions (RGS), shares how RGS is transforming the approach to IT modernization, giving government customers and partners unparalleled flexibility and choice. Allowing them to leverage new technologies without the constraints of vendor lock-in or hardware limitations, ensuring a future-proof IT environment.

While the push towards modernization in the U.S. Government and Military is critical, transforming and modernizing government IT infrastructure has never been more challenging. Traditional service providers are increasingly becoming a source of frustration. Agencies find themselves constrained by the technical limitations, escalating costs, and inflexibility of these legacy systems.  

Overview and Introduction

In today's highly connected world, we sometimes forget that there are many instances, especially in the government, where environments need to be intentionally isolated from external connectivity, creating what is known as an air-gapped or disconnected environment. In some cases, these environments may have external connectivity, but that connectivity is extremely unreliable or is limited in it's communication, creating what is known as a denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited impact environment.

In a recent webinar, Brandon Gulla, Chief Technology Officer at Rancher Government Solutions (RGS), alongside Dominic Perez from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, offered a deep dive into the world of cloud capabilities at the tactical edge. Hosted by Signal Media, this discussion was a masterclass in enhancing the effectiveness of military and emergency operations in challenging environments. 

The Changing Security Requirements Landscape

In the wake of watershed cybersecurity events like the SolarWinds breach and the Log4J vulnerability, federal agencies face urgent demands to secure their software supply chains. Along with emerging Congressional action and forthcoming CISA regulations, the Biden-Harris Administration’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (14028)1 is a direct response to these crises, imposing rigorous new standards for software security. The reality is clear: securing software supply chains is no longer optional; it’s a national imperative.

In a landscape cluttered with cybersecurity solutions, Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) distinguishes itself through a triad of differentiators: our adherence to Defense Information Security Agency (DISA)-approved Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), our commitment to Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140 Encryption standards, and our “Secure by Default” ethos.

Recently the NeuVector team released NeuVector version 5.2. This new feature added some much-needed features for our Government customers. This post will walk through those features and how to implement them.

In this deployment guide, we will be effortlessly installing the core Rancher Stack, including Rancher Kubernetes, Rancher Multi-Cluster Manger, Longhorn, and NeuVector. In about 15 minutes, we will have a three-node Kubernetes Cluster (RKE2), with lifecycle management (Rancher Manager), persistent storage (Longhorn), and cluster security (NeuVector).

 

Data security is becoming increasingly important to our customers. One of the great features of Longhorn is the ability to encrypt the volumes at rest. This blog is all about how to do that. Encrypting data volumes at rest means the data on the nodes is encrypted. For added security, we will want at least three nodes for high availability.

In this repo, we're going to cover the creation of a RKE2 cluster into Harvester using an airgapped process (aka Bootstrap!). We'll follow that up by installing Rancher on top of RKE2. We're going to do all of this using Terraform. Terraform allows us to declaratively define our environment in code and then create that environment in a straight-forward (and sustainable) way.