teleport/docs

Overview

Introduction

Gravitational Teleport is a tool for remotely accessing isolated clusters of Linux servers via SSH or HTTPS. Unlike traditional key-based access, Teleport enables teams to easily adopt the following practices:

• Avoid key distribution and trust on first use issues by using auto-expiring keys signed by a cluster certificate authority (CA).
• Enforce 2nd factor authentication.
• Connect to clusters located behind firewalls without direct Internet access via SSH bastions.
• Record and replay SSH sessions for audit purposes.
• Collaboratively troubleshoot issues via built-in session sharing.
• Discover online servers and running Docker containers within a cluster with dynamic node labels.

Take a look at Quick Start page to get a taste of using Teleport, or read the Architecture Document to get a full understanding of how Teleport works.

Why?

Mature tech companies with significant infrastructure footprints tend to implement most of these patterns internally. Gravitational Teleport allows smaller companies without significant in-house SSH expertise to easily adopt them as well. Teleport comes with a beautiful Web UI and a very permissive Apache 2.0 license.

Teleport is built on top of the high-quality Golang SSH implementation and it is fully compatible with OpenSSH.

Who Built Teleport?

Teleport was created by Gravitational Inc. We have built Teleport by borrowing from our previous experiences at Rackspace. It has been extracted from Gravity, our system for helping our clients to deploy and remotely manage their SaaS applications into many cloud regions or even on-premise.

Being a wonderful standalone tool, Teleport can be used as a software library enabling trust management in a complex multi-cluster, multi-region scenarios across many teams within multiple organizations.