Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 157 posts

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

#61

Post by geoctl »

b0a04gl wrote: post #54

what if this wasnt something you add after infra but the checkpoint you start with. right now you spin up a vm or db then wrap vpn or firewall around it. but imagine writing access rules first in way : 'team ml can hit service x' or 'web app can hit this backend' and the system wires infra from that.. infra becomes a side effect of access intent. access isnt something you cant guard always( as things move fast, break…

If I did understand your point then Octelium actually tries to do what you want to see, at least to a certain extent via managed containers. For example, Octelium can deploy, scale and manage your containerized applications (e.g. web apps, APIs, databases or even PiHole DNS servers) and automatically serve and protect them as Octelium Services. Once you're done with the Service with whatever reason, all the underlying managed container infrastructe is automatically cleaned up. You can see some examples from the docs here:

https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/management/guide/s... https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/management/guide/s... https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/management/guide/s... https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/management/guide/s...

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

#62

Post by dudeinjapan »

geoctl wrote: post #60
dudeinjapan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about: “Octelium is a secure, policy-based access gateway to your HTTP services, with both VPN tunnel-based and OAuth/zero-trust modes available. (And it can do a lot more!)”

Thank you. I think your description is great but I, as a user myself, might see it as an identity-aware proxy (i.e. something like Pomerium and Ory Oathkeeper IaPs which are great projects) as opposed to a complete Kubernetes-tier platform that does the entire process of remote access, access control, visibility and auditing, user and identtiy management, centralized policy management, etc... from a data-plane and co…

Much of this writing is about finding the right level of detail to communicate the core ideas.

“Octelium is a full-featured access control platform, which provides API gateways and/or VPN tunnels to your HTTP services, paired with an intuitive user, policy, and auditing backplane and policy-as-code.”

Something like the above would be much more enticing to potential users including myself. I can get a rough idea of what I can actually use it for and how it can be integrated into my existing stack—and if there are more features I’ll be pleasantly surprised when I read the docs!

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

#63

Post by PoachedEggs »

ttul wrote: post #49
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…

TailScale is wonderful but they do need competition. I imagine an IPO is on the horizon, and as soon as they enter that phase, nasty price increases are sure to follow unless someone else is nipping hard at their heels.

I’ve been meaning to explore Netbird. Fewer features at the moment, but can be fully self hosted.

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

#64

Post by sieabahlpark »

geoctl wrote: post #47
cyanydeez wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have been developing the project solo on a private GitHub repo since 2020. I am not VC-backed or whatever else, Octelium has been a solo effort so far basically. The project itself is now 100% open source as you can see. However, even if I open sourced the initial private repo, what would make you believe that I am who I really am? maybe even all those git commits from 2020 weren't really from 2020 and their timest…

[dead]

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

#65

Post by wkat4242 »

There are so so many of these already...

- Tinc (the OG of P2P VPN)

- Hamachi (not open though)

- ZeroTier

- Nebula (from Slack)

- Tailscale

- Netbird

I wonder why people keep building more. I know each has its own quirks and things they're better at, but the difference is really quite minimal.

One of the things I really would like is zero-trust 'lighthouses'. With current Zerotier and Tailscale, you really have to trust them because they can add nodes on your account whenever they want. I don't want that, I want fully self-hosted and for the lighthouses to just coordinate but not to be part of the network. I have to do some research to see what would be best.

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

#66

Post by wkat4242 »

ttul wrote: post #49
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…

TailScale is wonderful but they do need competition. I imagine an IPO is on the horizon, and as soon as they enter that phase, nasty price increases are sure to follow unless someone else is nipping hard at their heels.

But there are so so many competing products already?

Not all are commercial (but why would you want that anyway). But ZeroTier is another one like that. Basically the same thing.

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

#68

Post by wkat4242 »

seabrookmx wrote: post #53
ttul wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TailScale is wonderful but they do need competition. I imagine an IPO is on the horizon, and as soon as they enter that phase, nasty price increases are sure to follow unless someone else is nipping hard at their heels.

Hopefully their tolerance to self-hosters (Headscale) doesn't change.

The problem is, commercial services will always enshittify. It's inevitable. Even when they conquer the whole market (see Netflix) they will want to see a rising line in profits so then they will turn the thumbscrews on the customers.

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

#69

Post by geoctl »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #62
geoctl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I think your description is great but I, as a user myself, might see it as an identity-aware proxy (i.e. something like Pomerium and Ory Oathkeeper IaPs which are great projects) as opposed to a complete Kubernetes-tier platform that does the entire process of remote access, access control, visibility and auditing, user and identtiy management, centralized policy management, etc... from a data-plane and co…

Much of this writing is about finding the right level of detail to communicate the core ideas. “Octelium is a full-featured access control platform, which provides API gateways and/or VPN tunnels to your HTTP services, paired with an intuitive user, policy, and auditing backplane and policy-as-code.” Something like the above would be much more enticing to potential users including myself. I can get a rough idea of wh…

I completely agree with you. And tbqh since almost everybody in the thread is complaining about the README then I must be really doing something wrong explaining Octelium and what it does. I will certainly put more effort to make the README and especially the main description section more useful and easier to understand without transforming it into more of a marketing pitch. As I mentioned in other replies, it's actually really hard to concisely describe fairly complex projects (e.g. Kubernetes, Istio, etc...), especially to newcomers. But I will definitely do my best to improve the docs and README. Thank you really for your insightful comments.

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

#70

Post by apitman »

wkat4242 wrote: post #65

There are so so many of these already... - Tinc (the OG of P2P VPN) - Hamachi (not open though) - ZeroTier - Nebula (from Slack) - Tailscale - Netbird I wonder why people keep building more. I know each has its own quirks and things they're better at, but the difference is really quite minimal. One of the things I really would like is zero-trust 'lighthouses'. With current Zerotier and Tailscale, you really have to t…

And many more: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
Post reply on HN