I am a dev on the OpenZiti project. I personally think Tailscale is more similar to OpenZiti. It's making wireguard administration really easy.
zrok is very clearly based heavily on inspiration from the amazing tool called ngrok. If you haven't checked them out you should. They are widely loved for lots of good reasons. Other product/projects in this category is Tailscale's funnels or Cloudflare tunnels.
Key differences to ngrok are it being fully open source and fully self hostable. zrok allows you to do public/anonymous type sharing too but also has this private sharing feature that you might find neat. Basically it'll hide your app behind two "localhost" type proxies all transparently (to most people).
I just looked up ngrok right now and it looks really cool, but I wonder what people actually use it for? Are people actually running production software this way, or is it just for sharing e.g. demos with coworkers? If the latter, it seems to me like a narrow use case that can already be served by automated devops stuff.
Again this is new to me, so I'm probably missing some obvious use cases. Do you use it for anything in particular?
- showing a POC running locally / quick demo/ short terms project
- debug incoming webhook or the like.
Let’s say you have a service where you can register a URL, and that the service will post a http request to you when a event occurs.
I use ngrok, piped to a local handler. It’s convenient
Easily sharing local resources is a common need as a dev, for sure. If I'm making changes to a web form, updating online doc, etc. it's dreadfully convenient to just share that resource for some short amount of time...
I've used similar tech when collaborating with a fella recently, he stood up a vault server and I hit his private API over an ngrok share because that was the tool he had used, liked and was familiar with.
It's just super handy to do that sort of thing when/as you need to
This is the thing. I used it for debugging stripe and AWS SNS webhooks a bunch last year.
However, ngrok totally lost its soul in the past few years. It looks like the pricing was lowered again recently, but for a while there they had no “personal” or ~indie priced plan.
Meanwhile they did a feature takeaway from annual subscribers, and a less than good transition of those plans to their new system and pricing tiers.
If you go to ngrok.com right now there is a big header banner that reads: “ Announcing 50M round for API-first ingress-as-a-service. ”
This service used to be run by maybe one or two people. I could not be less interested in a developer tool that treats VC funding as something I should be excited about. The product was good the way it was.
I’m glad whoever was involved seems to have found an exit of some kind—-but all that is to say zrok looks great. I won’t renew my ngrok sub, and will go through the trouble of updating the saved dev testing URLs at stripe and AWS.
zrok is very clearly based heavily on inspiration from the amazing tool called ngrok. If you haven't checked them out you should. They are widely loved for lots of good reasons. Other product/projects in this category is Tailscale's funnels or Cloudflare tunnels.
Key differences to ngrok are it being fully open source and fully self hostable. zrok allows you to do public/anonymous type sharing too but also has this private sharing feature that you might find neat. Basically it'll hide your app behind two "localhost" type proxies all transparently (to most people).