smoonen
Contributor
Contributor

Feedback on BYOEaaS

I've reviewed the documentation - thanks - but haven't had a chance to test this yet.

It's interesting to me that this solution exists in a space in between provider and tenant. Unlike the org SSO configuration, there is some responsibility on the provider's part to establish connectivity to the KMS. However, there is still a tenant responsibility to authenticate with the KMS.

In the enterprise context, I can understand why this might be a good arrangement. However, in a cloud context, it is likely that the cloud provider is managing both Director and the KMS. In this case the cloud provider might have means of managing both the network connectivity to KMS as well as the authentication to KMS. As a result:

1. It seems desirable to me for this solution to optionally allow the provider to manage authentication instead of the tenant. In this case, the provider should be able not only to publish the KMS to a tenant org, but there should be a way to ensure that existing and new tenant VDCs are enrolled in the KMS rather than in the default key provider.
2. It seems highly desirable to me for APIs or CLIs to be exposed allowing the provider to automate all of this configuration. The documentation as currently written only shows UI operations.

In fact I had pictured that this feature would be offered by establishing a vCenter KMS connection and selecting a Key Provider per org much like vCenter today allows you to select a Key Provider per cluster. It's interesting to me that you've chosen to implement this as a solution addon instead.

Thanks for the opportunity to review this early!

Reply
0 Kudos