Sunday, August 7th is International Friendship Day. This got us thinking about how Facebook has been so successful in connecting the world by friends sharing information. They announced last week that they have over 1.1 billion active daily users – that’s a lot of sharing.
What if you could share servers as easily as you share pictures with your friends on Instagram and Facebook? If people could share computing technology as easily they share viral videos, imagine all the interesting things they might create – from web devs hosting pop-up sites and projects, to programmers iterating rapidly on fascinating proofs-of-concept. You could collaborate on weekend hacks without getting distracted by a ton of setup and configuration, or you could give a quick tutorial to family or friends that are new to Linux on how to login to a server and navigate the command line. You might call it “raw tech training”.
Today, ScaleFT, Packet, and CoreOS are launching an experiment where you can share your servers with your friends by using Facebook as the authentication mechanism. It’s a quick way to show how versatile the ScaleFT authentication platform can be: Give us a reliable authentication mechanism, and we can log you into a server with it.
Now you can log in to a cloud server with Facebook, just like you can log in to other apps, like Lyft or Spotify. Packet provides free Friendship-day access to bare metal servers running CoreOS, and ScaleFT manages user accounts based on the Facebook IDs of you and your friends – enabling you to easily and safely manage who can use which servers. That’s right, you don’t even need your own server. Packet is sharing a server with you for the next week.
How it works
Modern consumer applications often allow people to log in with Facebook or Google. People trust Facebook and Google to be their secure source of online identity.
Traditionally, infrastructure engineers use cryptographic mechanisms to access servers managed by enterprise identity providers like Okta or Active Directory. What if server access was as easy as logging into Facebook?
That’s what this experiment is all about.
Here’s how it works:
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ScaleFT provides dynamic user and access management for servers. In many ways the ScaleFT platform is a programmable Certificate Authority.
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ScaleFT integrates with Facebook Login, in a similar manner to other OpenID providers.
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When you first sign in using a Facebook account, ScaleFT creates a Packet bare-metal Type-0 server running CoreOS.
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We provide a cloud-init that installs the ScaleFT agent (sftd), running under rkt, the container engine by CoreOS.
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When you click the Login button on the ScaleFT dashboard, the ScaleFT platform generates an ephemeral, time-limited SSH Certificate that grants access to a server, based on the permissions in the ScaleFT platform (i.e., you and your friends).
Click this link to get started!
Here are Paul's friends and the login links to their servers:
Participate
Happy International Friends Day from ScaleFT, Packet, and CoreOS. If you share our mission to make access to modern computing more readily available, then join in our experiment and help your friends log in to a server today! Please reach out directly if you have ideas about how to make this experiment more fun.
Follow CoreOS on Facebook.