Scaling Privileged Access for Modern Infrastructure: Real-World Insights
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Teleport

Proxy Peering

Version 15.x

Proxy Peering enables Teleport agents to be reachable without connecting to every Teleport Proxy Service. This allows Teleport Proxy instances to scale horizontally without increasing the number of connections created by agents.

Note

A Teleport agent is a Teleport instance that provides access to resources in your infrastructure, i.e., by running the SSH, Kubernetes, Database, Application, or Desktop Services.

By default, Teleport agents need to create a reverse tunnel to every Teleport Proxy to ensure a client is able to reach every agent. With Proxy Peering this is no longer a requirement. When Proxy Peering is enabled agents will automatically change their behavior to connect to the configured number of Teleport Proxy instances.

How it works

Proxy Service

A gRPC service on each Teleport Proxy Service instance provides an API for establishing a bi-directional connection to the agents connected to that Teleport Proxy. Teleport Proxy instances manage a gRPC client to all other Teleport Proxy instances in the cluster.

Routing information on which Teleport Proxy instances each agent is connected to is stored in Teleport's backend and propagated to each Teleport Proxy instance.

The routing information and gRPC service allow a Teleport Proxy to identify which Proxy Service instance an agent is connected to and create an end-to-end connection from a client to that agent. This allows for access to the agent without connecting to the same Teleport Proxy instance initially.

Reverse tunnel agents

Agents will check whether you have enabled Proxy Peering before attempting to create a reverse tunnel to a Teleport Proxy instance.

By default, in Proxy Peering mode, agents are configured to connect to a single Teleport Proxy instance. For high availability a cluster administrator may configure agents to connect to 2 or more Teleport Proxy instances.

Teleport Proxy Peering

Next Steps

  • See the migration guide to learn how to upgrade an existing cluster to use Proxy Peering