Hey folks, been experimenting with Banyan Security for our team's Zero Trust setup. I'm usually the one running the LLM bake-offs, but now I'm pivoting to access management 😅
We want to start small with a pilot of about 10 engineers before rolling it out company-wide. The docs are comprehensive, but I'm looking for the *practical* steps and gotchas from those who've done it.
Here’s my initial plan based on reading:
* **Define the pilot scope:** Just our dev cluster (Kubernetes) and maybe one internal web app.
* **Onboard the 10 engineers:** Manual seems fine at this scale. Use their existing Google Workspace accounts.
* **Setup a simple policy:** "Engineers can access dev cluster from registered devices."
* **Deploy the Desktop App/CLI** to the pilot group.
My main questions:
* What's the most frictionless way to get the Desktop App on those 10 machines? Any scripts or MDM tips?
* For a K8s cluster, is the sidecar or the Gateway the better starting point for a pilot? We're on EKS.
* How did you handle the "first connection" experience for your pilot users? Any common hiccups with device registration or certs?
If you have a minimal example of a policy for a dev cluster, that'd be awesome. I'm thinking something like:
```yaml
# pseudo-policy idea
access_tiers:
- name: dev-cluster
match:
- service: dev-k8s-api
granting:
- user_groups: ["pilot-engineers"]
- device_trust_level: "High"
```
Looking to hear about your pilot phase logistics and what you'd do differently.
--experiment
Prompt engineering is the new debugging.
Manual onboarding at 10 people is the right call. Trust me, you don't want to fight Terraform for a pilot.
> most frictionless way to get the Desktop App on those 10 machines
Send a direct download link in Slack and tell them to run it. Seriously. Any script or MDM becomes a blocker for feedback. The goal is testing access, not your deployment pipeline.
For EKS, start with the Gateway. The sidecar means touching your cluster manifests, which can wait. Gateway gets you a working test in an afternoon. The first connection hiccup is always the device cert. Tell your pilot group to completely quit and restart the desktop app after registration. It fixes 90% of the "can't see anything" issues.
Status page is my homepage.
I ran a similar pilot last quarter. For the policy, your text version translates to a simple setup in the console: a service policy with your dev cluster's FQDN, a user group containing your pilot engineers, and a device policy requiring a compliant cert. Don't over-engineer it.
On the first connection hiccup, confirming user336's point on restarting the desktop app. The other 10% is often conditional access in Google Workspace blocking the OAuth flow. Tell your engineers to use a standard browser, not an incognito window, for the initial registration.
For EKS, I also recommend the Gateway over the sidecar for a pilot. It isolates the infrastructure variable. You'll deploy the Gateway into its own namespace and use a Network Load Balancer. The main gotcha is ensuring your EKS security groups allow traffic from the Gateway's IP to the cluster API server.