SSH Gate Overview

SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol used to connect securely to a remote container and execute the required commands on it. SSH commands are encrypted and secure: client/server connection is authenticated using a digital certificate, and passwords are protected by being encrypted.

To enable SSH access on the platform, a new infrastructure component was added to the core: SSH Gate. SSH Gate accepts users’ connections from the internet and then forwards them to the desired container over an internal network.

The authentication procedure in SSH Gate is divided into two independent parts:

connection from end user to Gate (external authentication)
connection from Gate to users’ container (internal authentication)

Both parts of the authentication procedure are based on a standard SSH protocol, using public/private key pairs.

With SSH Gate, you can easily access:

the whole account where you can navigate across your environments and containers using an interactive menu without extra authentication

separate containers directly while working with them remotely via additional tools (e.g. Capistrano) or using SFTP and FISH protocols

While accessing containers via SSH, a user receives all required permissions and additionally can manage the main services with sudo commands of the following kind (and others):

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sudo systemctl start jetty
sudo systemctl stop mysql
sudo systemctl restart tomcat
sudo systemctl status memcached
sudo systemctl reload tomcat

Note: If you deploy any application, change the configurations or add any extra functionality via SSH to your environment, this will not be displayed at the platform dashboard.

In addition, we provide support of SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) by implementing the threaded daemon for SFTP connections processing. It lets you access, manage and transfer files directly to the container via SSH gate, and in such a way, ensures data security.

An additional secure network protocol is FISH (Files transferred over Shell protocol). It is supported by a number of popular FTP-clients and file managers (e.g. Midnight Commander, Konqueror, lftp, Krusader, etc.) and permits a user to securely access and manage a container’s file system.

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