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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

#21

Post by geoctl »

reachableceo wrote: post #12
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…

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…

Thank you so much. I will definitely contact you very soon.

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

#23

Post by therealpygon »

geoctl wrote: post #17
drexlspivey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

What you took away from that was that “next-gen” was the problem?

Buzzwords can still be technically accurate and you seem to be ignoring that when it keeps being confronted. “But it is” doesn’t matter when it comes to “but it sounds like”.

Let me give you an example; if I was walk into a store, do you think I want to talk to the person who talks about the “bidirectional optoelectromechanical document transcription and reproduction apparatus implementing discrete photonic acquisition and microdeposition techniques for bidimensional substrate encoding”, or do I want to talk to the person who will sell me a “photocopier”?

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

#24

Post by geoctl »

therealpygon wrote: post #20

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 buz…

Thank you for your insightful feedback. I completely understand the criticism because Octelium is conciously designed to be many things at the same time. As mentioned in the other replies, Octelium is a unified/generic zero trust access platform that can fit in many human-to-workload and workload-to-workload use cases (the docs contain various examples in detail) that's why it might be confusing for newcomers. The initial commit came out of nowhere because I've been working on this project since early 2020 actually and decided to start with a clean public repo when I publicly released the code a month ago, after nearly 9000 manual commits over the past 5 years. I simply could not verify that I could have potentially leaked private info esepcially in early commits and the project itself almost entirely changed over the past 5 years from a simple remote access WireGuard VPN to what it is today in terms of architecture, features and complexity.

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

#25

Post by maxmcd »

geoctl wrote: post #17
drexlspivey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

I think "no buzzwords" would be further in the direction of:

"This software let's you set up peer to peer networking between your devices, expose them to the internet, run applications on them, view useful runtime information, and integrate easily with cloud providers and infrastructure you're familiar with."

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

#26

Post by catlifeonmars »

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…

Gentle feedback: if it’s hard to concisely define what Octelium is, it will be hard to convince people to use it.

To me this sounds like an L7 identity & access management layer for wireguard, but again I had trouble parsing the readme.

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

#27

Post by sureglymop »

geoctl wrote: post #17
drexlspivey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

I think the issue here is that while these terms may be very familiar to you (and to me personally also), they are not at all familiar to most people who will encounter your project.

Thus, those people coming across your project may quickly overlook it instead of giving it a chance which is disappointing.

By contrast, here is Tailscales tagline: "Fast, seamless device connectivity — no hardware, no firewall rules, no wasted time."

That kind of tells even a non-technical user what it is for even if it dumbs down all it can do. That user then doesn't need to know any technical jargon or how it works under the hood or even what wireguard is at all. The tagline is what prompts them to install and try it out and from there the UX is the deciding factor in whether they keep using it or not.

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

#28

Post by geoctl »

pydry wrote: post #22

Can you use VPNs outside of your infra (e.g. protonvpn, mullvad) as an exit node?

Interesting. One way to do that in Octelium is via a SOCKS5 proxy served as an Octelium Service. In fact the Octelium Cluster nodes itself can operate as exit nodes directly and you can use that as a form of consumer VPN. You can even deploy and scale TOR containers over Octelium and have load balanced TOR.

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

#29

Post by sevg »

geoctl wrote: post #19
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.

Your readme isn’t great, but I wouldn’t pay much attention to this guide that this person keeps posting.

It’s way too long and excessively prescriptive, and the author goes too far with inserting their opinions (ie, don’t use github, don’t use discord etc.). I couldn’t possibly recommend this howto.

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

#30

Post by geoctl »

sureglymop wrote: post #27
geoctl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the issue here is that while these terms may be very familiar to you (and to me personally also), they are not at all familiar to most people who will encounter your project. Thus, those people coming across your project may quickly overlook it instead of giving it a chance which is disappointing. By contrast, here is Tailscales tagline: "Fast, seamless device connectivity — no hardware, no firewall rules, no…

Thank you. I completely understand your point. But as mentioned in the other replies. Octelium is designed to be much more than just a VPN. It is not even tied to provide remote access to "devices" or resources behind NAT. It's zero trust architecture that's equally designed to provide access to internal resources and publicly protected resources such as SaaS APIs, databases, Kubernetes APIservers, SSH, etc... It provides both client-based (i.e. VPN-like) access as well as clientless access for both humans and workloads. For example, Humans can just use their browsers to access internal resources behind NAT like a typical protected SaaS resource. Workloads written in any programming language can access protected HTTP/gRPC APIs, Kubernetes, etc... via standard OAuth2 and bearer authentication without using any clients or special SDKs even such protected resources are protected by different API keys/access tokens.
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