Introduction

Chisel Operator is a lightweight L4 (Layer 4) tunneling operator for Kubernetes that lets you expose services publicly from restricted environments without VPNs, BGP, or complex networking.

It does this by leveraging Chisel, a lightweight L4 tunnel that initiates SSH-over-WebSocket connections from your cluster to a publicly-accessible exit node, securely forwarding traffic back to your services.

Chisel Operator manages the lifecycle of these tunnels and exit nodes, exposing them to other Kubernetes resources as a standard Kubernetes LoadBalancer service. This allows you to use the same familiar Kubernetes APIs to expose your services, while Chisel Operator handles the complexity of managing the tunnels and exit nodes for you.