Open ziti for beginner

1

I'm a newbie here who is looking to implement a zero trust network for an internship project at my company. After reviewing the system architecture and configuration details for OpenZiti, I find them quite complex for someone just starting out with zero trust concepts.

Is OpenZiti suitable for beginners like myself? Can someone new to zero trust networking effectively use and implement OpenZiti, or is there a significant learning curve?

I'm eager to learn and implement zero trust principles, but I want to ensure I'm choosing a solution that won't be overwhelming for a beginner. Any insights, advice, or resources for getting started with OpenZiti as a newbie would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi @garry0, welcome to the community and to OpenZiti (and zrok and browzer)!

I think you're well-suited to learn OpenZiti. You (maybe?) won't have tons of learned knowledge of "this is how you secure a network" so in many ways, I'd think learning OpenZiti would be easier for you. Contrary to that point, it's definitely a newer field and even though we are like, 6+ years into developing OpenZiti it's still not as widely known (zero trust in general, but also OpenZiti) making it sometimes harder to find the right bit of information you're after which is why forums like this are criticality important.

If you allow the software to do what it's good at, and you merely implement the OpenZiti overlay network, I don't think you'll find it hard to use at all. We have loads of users who pick up the stack and use it without any issues whatsoever. This forum provides a backstop for people whenever they might get lost and need to be put back on track.

Now, if you start by digging though the code, well 6+ years of work and understanding are behind that from a team of people who are all incredible talented. THAT will be a daunting task for a new learner for sure.

Picking up one of our SDKs and using it though? Should be easy. :smiley:

Here's some inspiration and motivation for you :rofl:

3

If it helps your introduction, I recently gave a presentation (1 hr) at the Cloud Security Alliance, which provides a great intro on the 'why' as well as use cases - 'Zero Trust Networking for difficult use cases—Multi-Cloud/OT/IoT, air-gapped networks and more' - I gave a talk on zero trust networking for CI/OT/IoT | Philip Griffiths posted on the topic | LinkedIn.

4

Thanks for the response. I’ll definitely focus on setting up the overlay network first, i also check out the blog and the AWS Lambda example you shared.

I’m sure I’ll have more questions as I dive in. Thanks again!

5

Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll definitely watch the presentation—sounds like a solid way to get a better understanding of zero trust and see some cool use cases. Appreciate you sharing it.