Overview
A single iron-proxy is a default-deny firewall for one workload. A fleet of them is a distributed system, and distributed systems need a control plane. The iron-proxy control plane is that layer.
Policies are authored once and converge across every connected proxy in seconds. New proxies enroll on boot with a short-lived token and pull their config on first connect. There is nothing baked into the image and nothing to template per host. Every intercepted request from every proxy streams into a unified audit store you can query by workload, destination, policy decision, or injected secret.
What You Get
Policy as the source of truth. Allowlists, secret mappings, and transform rules live in the control plane and are versioned there. Proxies are stateless clients; rebuild a host and it pulls the current policy on reconnect. There is no per-host YAML to drift.
Live updates, no restarts. Publish a policy change and every connected proxy applies it within seconds. Tightening an allowlist mid-incident or rotating a secret mapping is a single API call, not a fleet-wide redeploy.
Zero-config enrollment. A proxy starts with IRON_BOOTSTRAP_TOKEN=… and nothing else. Tokens are short-lived and single-use by default, so the same image safely boots in CI, in a sandbox, or in a long-lived VM. See Enrollment for the token model.
Fleet-wide audit search. Every request across every proxy lands in one queryable store, indexed by host, workload tag, destination, decision, and the secrets that were proxied in. No per-host log shipping, no Loki cluster to operate.
Flexible Deployment
The control plane is available as a hosted cloud service and as an on-prem, self-hosted instance. Both run the same software and expose the same API, UI, and proxy protocol, so moving between them is a config change rather than a rewrite.
Hosted is the fastest path to a working fleet. You enroll proxies against a tenant endpoint and get policy management, live updates, enrollment, and audit search without operating anything yourself. Best for teams that want a production-ready control plane in minutes and do not have data-residency or network-isolation requirements.
Self-hosted runs entirely inside your own infrastructure, with source available. Policy data and audit logs stay on your network, and the deployment can be fully air-gapped. Best for regulated environments, on-prem-only networks, or any setting where a managed service is not an option.
Next Steps
The fastest way to see the control plane in action is a live walkthrough. Book a demo and we’ll show you policy authoring, live updates, enrollment, and audit search against a real fleet.