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Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

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Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#11

Post by drexlspivey »

geoctl wrote: post #9
mzhaase wrote: post #6

I have an immediate complete distrust to anything that throws around so many buzzwords. This is the github page and I still don't understand what it even does, specifically.

I'd appreciate if you could provide me a list of those buzzwords so that I can improve the readme.

“A next-gen FOSS self-hosted unified zero trust secure access platform that can operate as a remote access VPN, a ZTNA/BeyondCorp architecture, API/AI gateway, a PaaS, an infrastructure for MCP & A2A architectures or even as an ngrok-alternative and a homelab infrastructure.”

Literally every single word of it

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#12

Post by reachableceo »

geoctl wrote: post #4
kosolam wrote: post #2

It looks very interesting, but I’m getting lost in the pages of features and different use cases. It would have been nice to have a succinct list of features/capabilities (technical, not buzzword) and why this solution solves better than alternatives.

Thank you. I understand it's hard to concisely define what Octelium is because it is designed as a unified/generic secure/zero trust access platform, a term that almost nobody would relate to. It's more of a generic Kubernetes-like architecture/infrastructure for zero trust secure access that can fit many different use cases (i.e. human to workload and workload to workload environments). Well, it can be used as a typ…

Please update your HN profile with contact information.

This product? Framework? Solution? seems to be exactly what I’ve been looking for / attempting to put together for my company. We are entirely self hosted and use only FLO software.

We use Cloudron as our core PAAS and have been looking for a FLO zero trust / identity aware proxy for DB/RDP/SSH .

Happy to be your flagship customer.

We have a brand new k8s (self hosted) cluster deployed . We use wazuh as our SEIM, librenms for monitoring / alerting.

Currently we use tailscale (with magicdns disabled and we hand out our internal pi hole IP as our recursive DNS server ) (and we have an authoritative DNS for our internal corporate domain).

Charles@turnsys.com reaches me pretty quickly most days. Would love to deploy this immediately and write a testimonial etc

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#13

Post by geoctl »

alienbaby wrote: post #5
geoctl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I understand it's hard to concisely define what Octelium is because it is designed as a unified/generic secure/zero trust access platform, a term that almost nobody would relate to. It's more of a generic Kubernetes-like architecture/infrastructure for zero trust secure access that can fit many different use cases (i.e. human to workload and workload to workload environments). Well, it can be used as a typ…

Perhaps it would be easier to go through a few typical use cases and implementations, and describe how they work with less brand naming and technical fancywords. I scanned the github, and your reply above, and I still don't really get it. I imagine I would understand it better if I was more fluent in the vocabulary you use and understood what some of the platforms and interesting names did from the get go. So yea, my…

I honestly don't understand where the "sales pitch" part is. This project has been so far a solo effort and I am the one who basically wrote all the code. It's not like this is some VC-backed product where I am a marketing guy replying to you. I would appreciate it if you could provide me direct questions about what you don't understand so that I can answer you.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#15

Post by reachableceo »

alienbaby wrote: post #5
geoctl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I understand it's hard to concisely define what Octelium is because it is designed as a unified/generic secure/zero trust access platform, a term that almost nobody would relate to. It's more of a generic Kubernetes-like architecture/infrastructure for zero trust secure access that can fit many different use cases (i.e. human to workload and workload to workload environments). Well, it can be used as a typ…

Perhaps it would be easier to go through a few typical use cases and implementations, and describe how they work with less brand naming and technical fancywords. I scanned the github, and your reply above, and I still don't really get it. I imagine I would understand it better if I was more fluent in the vocabulary you use and understood what some of the platforms and interesting names did from the get go. So yea, my…

I do agree with that. As a potential customer , reading over the page, it was incredibly redundant / dense.

I recommend using an LLM to rewrite it far more succinctly.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#16

Post by ar-nelson »

For everyone who's having a hard time parsing what Octelium does, I found this page to be the clearest explanation: https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/how-octel...

It's clearer because, instead of starting with a massive list of everything you could do with Octelium (which is indeed confusing), it starts by explaining the core primitives Octelium is built on, and builds up from there.

And it actually looks pretty cool and useful! From what I can tell, the core funtionality is:

- A VPN-like gateway that understands higher-level protocols, like HTTP or PostgreSQL, and can make fine-grained security decisions using the content of those protocols

- A cluster configuration layer on top of Kubernetes

And these two things combine to make, basically, a personal cloud. So, like any of the big cloud platforms, it does a million things and it's hard to figure out which ones you need at first. But it seems like the kind of system that could be used for a homelab, a small company that wants to keep cloud costs down, or a custom PaaS selling cloud functionality. Neat!

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#17

Post by geoctl »

drexlspivey wrote: post #11
geoctl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd appreciate if you could provide me a list of those buzzwords so that I can improve the readme.

“A next-gen FOSS self-hosted unified zero trust secure access platform that can operate as a remote access VPN, a ZTNA/BeyondCorp architecture, API/AI gateway, a PaaS, an infrastructure for MCP & A2A architectures or even as an ngrok-alternative and a homelab infrastructure.” Literally every single word of it

I admit that the "next-gen" word might sound cheesy. As I said in the other reply, the more correct definition for Octelium is: a unified zero trust secure access platform. However, as I said this is a term that nobody would relate to. It's a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform but not in the rigid sense. It's also a WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access VPN but it operates at layer-7 to provide L7 aware access control, secretless access, dynamic configuration and routing as well as OpenTelemtry-native visibility and auditing via identity-aware proxies and policy-decision-points instead of just controlling access at layer-3. As I said, it's designed to be more like a generic Kubernetes-like architecture for secure remote access that can be used for many different use cases.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#19

Post by geoctl »

sneak wrote: post #14

As the other commenters have pointed out, your README is offputting. Last year I wrote an article about how to write a good README: https://sneak.berlin/20241224/readme-howto/

Thank you. I will definitely work on making the README more concise and hopefully more useful and easy to understand.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#20

Post by therealpygon »

Just some feedback to share some problems I personally think you’re going to have and why I suspect you’ll face a healthy amount of skepticism. There is a lack of history of development that ends with a major initial commit of unknown origin, a lack of any public information, a company that does not appear (publicly) to exist, and a product that is going to solve every need that can be imagined by packing it with buzzwords and little to no evidence of security. When faced with those things, my next step would be to consider how much is original versus built on underlying technologies I know and trust; information that is lacking.

If you’re launching a business, I would suggest making sure the business looks legitimate; if it’s a pet project, trying to make yourself sound like a big business and then not having the footprint gives off “fake”/scam/caution vibes. If you’re a solo dev, drop all the fake business stuff and get rid of the buzz words and “it can do everything” marketing and focus on what it excels at as an open source project.

People are going to be skeptical (rightfully) that a solo dev/no name company is going to suddenly drop a product that rivals those of massive companies. Either massive shortcuts were taken, or there is a high chance that it will be insecure, which is not something you want from a VPN or any of the other things it claims to do. If you’ve built on existing secure technologies, you should emphasizing them because known names that have a security history are going to build a lot more trust than a no-name product.

If a software is hard to explain the purpose of to an average person in a single sentence, you have an uphill battle. Listing more features isn’t usually going to be the answer, regardless of how accurate you’re attempting to be. “It’s a VPN! and a PaaS! and a ZTNA! And an API Gateway! and AI!” It screams “please download me” rather than “I’m here to solve a problem“, which is why I wouldn’t even bother to try it; the opposite of what any project is going for.

My intention isn’t to just be critical, but rather to point out things that are likely harming your efforts.

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