Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#1

Post by geostyx » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel
erisa.dev

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#2

Post by chrisweekly » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

This looks pretty interesting to me. Self-hosting a webapp origin server on hardware in my house, fronted by CloudFlare... hmm. Food for thought.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#3

Post by willejs » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

You can also put authentication in front of cloudflare argo tunnels, so you can securely expose internally hosted applications to the internet. A zero trust or BeyondCorp model is usally way easier than VPNs etc. It is a really nice alternative to hosting Buzzfeed SSO or Pomerium too.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#4

Post by maxcan » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

Some issues (and solutions) that I ran into: https://www.maxcantor.com/blog/2021-10-15-ngrok-to-cloudflar...

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#5

Post by jgalt212 » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #2

This looks pretty interesting to me. Self-hosting a webapp origin server on hardware in my house, fronted by CloudFlare... hmm. Food for thought.

much cheaper than EC2 or Heroku.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#6

Post by davewritescode » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

I use this to expose services running in Kubernetes clusters and have Cloudflare tunnel pointing at my Kube gateways.

It makes a ton of things like cluster failover much simpler than they otherwise would be.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#7

Post by stingraycharles » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

davewritescode wrote: post #6

I use this to expose services running in Kubernetes clusters and have Cloudflare tunnel pointing at my Kube gateways. It makes a ton of things like cluster failover much simpler than they otherwise would be.

Yup, and you can even have multiple tunnels that are load balanced, so that you don’t even have to fail over.

We have a single API service which is exposed to the internet, and put the CloudFlare tunnel as a sidecar inside the same pods. This way, it’s actually CloudFlare which handles the load balancing, which is surprisingly effective.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#8

Post by kordlessagain » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

I would rather use ngrok for these things: https://ngrok.com/

The reason why is because Alan is awesome.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#9

Post by stingraycharles » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

chrisweekly wrote: post #2

This looks pretty interesting to me. Self-hosting a webapp origin server on hardware in my house, fronted by CloudFlare... hmm. Food for thought.

As a matter of fact, I have a 4-node kubernetes cluster running at home which is exposed through a CloudFlare tunnel on the internet. Works like a charm, and you don’t have issues with firewalls, NAT, and/or dynamic IPs.

Re: Exposing a web service with Cloudflare Tunnel

#10

Post by blinkingled » Tue, Feb 08, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

davewritescode wrote: post #6

I use this to expose services running in Kubernetes clusters and have Cloudflare tunnel pointing at my Kube gateways. It makes a ton of things like cluster failover much simpler than they otherwise would be.

Could you elaborate on the setup a bit - for cluster fail over do you mean that since cloudflare is your frontend ingress you can easily point it to another cluster or is there more to it?