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354 points geoctl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.23s | 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
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ar-nelson ◴[] No.44413163[source]
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 looks pretty cool and useful! From what I can tell, the core funtionality is:

- A VPN-like gateway that understands higher-level protocols, like HTTP or PostgreSQL, and can make fine-grained security decisions using the content of those protocols

- A cluster configuration layer on top of Kubernetes

And these two things combine to make, basically, a personal cloud. So, like any of the big cloud platforms, it does a million things and it's hard to figure out which ones you need at first. But it seems like the kind of system that could be used for a homelab, a small company that wants to keep cloud costs down, or a custom PaaS selling cloud functionality. Neat!

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ttul ◴[] No.44413988[source]
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.
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PoachedEggs ◴[] No.44414961[source]
I’ve been meaning to explore Netbird. Fewer features at the moment, but can be fully self hosted.
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FloatArtifact ◴[] No.44418155[source]
Their mobile android app is awful.
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1. braginini ◴[] No.44419575[source]
We have just published our android app rework for testing. Mind trying it out? Appreciate the feedback

https://www.reddit.com/r/netbird/s/lRjyehCQFi