For the curious, here are my notes for an upcoming Ziti TV episode where we’ll be talking about what’s in the OpenZiti Quickstart.
OpenZiti Quickstart is a single command (ziti edge quickstart) that launches a complete, working OpenZiti network a few seconds. It does a lot behind the scenes, by
- creating a fresh certificate authority hierarchy,
- initializing a controller database,
- creating and enrolling a router identity,
- bootstrapping an admin user,
- and starting both the controller and router as a single running process.
It does all this with sensible default policies already in place, which means identities can immediately connect through the router to any service.
As its name implies, the Quickstart is meant to get an OpenZiti zero trust network up and running is very short order, and it’s meant for demos, local development, and learning the platform. It has everything a production deployment would spread across multiple processes, machines, and days of setup, but it’s packed into a single instance that you can tear down and re-run whenever you want.
Simply put, it’s the fastest path from zero to a working network you can actually build against.
As for the question of why I go with handwritten notes: it’s easier to add diagrams, and I end up understanding and retaining things better.