←back to thread

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: 0s | 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
Show context
yjftsjthsd-h ◴[29 Jun 25 13:11 UTC] No.44412871[source]▶
The big thing to me about Tailscale is easy p2p connectivity. I think it looks like this doesn't do that and uses centralized router(s)?
replies(3): >>44412995 #>>44413556 #>>44418777 #
1. ethan_smith ◴[30 Jun 25 02:50 UTC] No.44418777[source]▶
Looking at the docs, Octelium uses a hub-and-spoke model with Gateways acting as central routing points, unlike Tailscale's direct peer-to-peer mesh - this architectural difference impacts performance, privacy, and deployment complexity.
replies(1): >>44418845 #
2. geoctl ◴[30 Jun 25 03:00 UTC] No.44418845[source]▶
No, Octelium does not use a hub-and-spoke model. It's a distributed system that's a horizontally salable architecture on top of Kubernetes. This design is meant to provide seamless horizontal scalability and availability, among other things.