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

Post by homarp » Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

geoctl wrote: post #13

alienbaby wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by geoctl » Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #34

geoctl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

But that's what I'm getting at. Even if it is much more, is all of that immediately relevant to a curious/potential new user? I understand it may not be easy to narrow down the explanation, especially if you invested a lot of time and don't want to do a disservice to yourself by underselling it. Looking at the Tailscale tagline I quoted, it is small and ambiguous enough that it works marketing wise, regardless of all…

Post by pydry » Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 3:26 PM UTC

geoctl wrote: post #28

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.

Post by geoctl » Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #44

geoctl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

I think the primary concern was you look like a State actor using a AI to generate a project you hope private companies will use and your intentions don't appear clear, and the verbose replies & github suggest a lot of effort into a facade without anything else. One might posit that you're repackaging a fOSS project from somewhere with no clear ethos.

Post by ttul » Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

ar-nelson wrote: post #16

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…