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

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 typical WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access/corporate VPN. It can be used as a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform with identity-based, L7 aware, context-aware ABAC via policy-as-code with CEL and OPA where you can control access at layer-7 (e.g. HTTP request headers, serialized JSON body content, etc...). It can also be used as an ngrok alternative (both secure access via OIDC/SAML/GitHub IdP as well as anonymously which can fit for hosting, testing APIs, etc...). It can also deploy your containerized resources and automatically provide client-based/clientless secure access to them (kinda like a PaaS) and it does provide dynamic configuration and routing to upstreams via policy-as-code (e.g. route to different API versions, use different SSH credentials, different API keys, different postgres user/password based on identity/context, etc....). It can also fit as an API/AI gateway and a scalable infrastructure for MCP architectures/meshes. Therefore, it's not really a ZTNA/VPN in the rigid sense, it's a more generic platform where what it does to secure/remote access is similar to what Kuberentes does for containers.

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 2p - break it down into some use cases from simple - intermediate - advanced, use more straight forward language and less platform / product names. Technical terms are fine, but try not to string a zillion of them together all in one go... it reads a bit too much like a sales pitch trying to cram in as many acronyms and cool sounding things as possible.