Today, Venafi announced the general availability of Venafi Firefly, the only lightweight machine identity issuer that supports highly distributed, cloud native environments. I’m very proud of this new technology and congratulate the whole team who delivered it.
We built Firefly to address new machine identity requirements we’re seeing in modern computing environments. One significant change is in the speed with which certificates are needed for securing machine-to-machine communication between an evolving set of services, applications, and other machines. Securing these modern environments can be complicated as traditional PKI solutions simply can’t keep up with the velocity or volumes required by highly distributed applications. Many applications need tens or hundreds of thousands of ephemeral machine identities a day and, in some cases, access is needed 24x7 because the machine identities are being used by fully automated processes.
To deliver on accelerated timelines, developers are often left to create their own solutions. Many of these hastily spun up machine identities may not meet organization policy, and their rogue nature leaves security teams without visibility into which machine identities are in use. To alleviate these problems, organizations need the ability to issue high volumes of security policy-compliant machine identities in extremely short timeframes. Until now, there has not been a solution that could deliver on all these measures.
Strengthen security posture while accelerating application development
Venafi Firefly is delivered as an easy-to-deploy container that can run in any cloud native environment, providing a fast, easy and secure way to issue machine identities. Machine identity policy is configured in the Venafi Control Plane and inherited by Firefly instances. Together, the Venafi Control Plane and Venafi Firefly provide a lightweight, distributed architecture that makes Firefly the only machine identity issuer for modern use cases requiring local high-speed autonomous issuance, low-latency cloud native use cases and advanced CI/CD with identity provider embedded in the pipeline.
Key features include:
- Versatility: Firefly has multiple, flexible deployment options including cloud, cloud-native, DevOps, and federated PKI.
- Performance: Firefly can generate keys and issue certificates at speeds and volumes well beyond service mesh requirements.
- Autonomy: Firefly operation is decentralized making it attractive to software architects and developers.
- Security: Firefly is managed and governed by the Venafi Control Plane and supports modern authentication mechanisms.
- Leanness: Firefly requires minimal infrastructure to deploy in production to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.
Firefly is unmatched in reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing the security of machine identities needed to enable modern cloud native applications.
You can learn more about Venafi Firefly here or start a free 30-day trial.
See how easy it is to deliver trusted certificates at warp speed
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