Turbo-charging kubectl: How Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access + Regional Proxies Deliver Lightning-Fast CLI Performance
When developers are halfway around the world from their clusters, every kubectl get pods can feel like it’s moving through molasses. Rafay’s Zero-Trust Kubectl (ZTKA) service fixes the security risks and the lag by adding a network of regional proxies between the user and the cluster.
Zero-Trust Kubectl in a Nutshell
Rafay ZTKA routes all CLI and web-terminal traffic through its Kube API Access Proxy. The key design goals are:
- Friction-free for users (“vanilla kubectl”),
- Zero infrastructure to manage for platform teams,
- Centralized RBAC + audit, and “great performance” even for clusters behind firewalls. 
Under the hood, users authenticate to Rafay; Rafay spins up just-in-time service accounts inside the target cluster and tears them down after idle timeouts, eliminating credential sprawl.