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

(github.com)
354 points geoctl | 2 comments | 29 Jun 25 11:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.442s | source

I have been working on Octelium for quite a few years now but it was open sourced only by late May 2025. Octelium, as described more in detail in the repo's README, is simply an open source, self-hosted, unified platform for zero trust resource access that is primarily meant to be a modern alternative to corporate VPNs and remote access tools. It can operate as a remote access/corporate VPN (i.e. alternative to Twingate, Tailscale, OpenVPN Access Server, etc...), a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform (i.e. alterntive to Cloudflare Access, Teleport, Google BeyondCorp, etc...), and it can also operate as an API/AI gateway, an infrastructure for MCP and A2A architectures and meshes, an ngrok alternative, a homelab infrastructure or even as a more advanced Kubernetes ingress. It's basically designed to operate like a unified Kubernetes-like scalable architecture for zero trust secure/remote access that's suitable for different human-to-workload and workload-to-workload environments. You can read more in detail the full set of main features and links about how it works in the repo's README or directly in the docs https://octelium.com/docs
1. b0a04gl ◴[29 Jun 25 16:13 UTC] No.44414205[source]▶
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, breaks fast), it's may become seed where you can design with.
replies(1): >>44414764 #
2. geoctl ◴[29 Jun 25 17:26 UTC] No.44414764[source]▶
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...