Netmaker VS Nebula

My plan is to set up an EC2 instance and host a VPN, considering options like Netmaker, OpenVPN, or Tailscale. The goal is to connect these devices to the VPN, enabling SSH access from any connected node. This method seems cost-effective(Considering I want to use 100s of devices and potentially 1000s) and straightforward, requiring a simple setup with a sudo apt command on the Raspberry Pi.

I'm wondering if there are any alternative approaches to achieve this. Is something like Netmaker or Tailscale feasible enough? If you have any suggestions, I'd greatly appreciate it.

https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker

Honorable mention:

SuperHighway84 - more of a Usenet-inspired darknet, but I love the concept + the author's personal website:

https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

Exciting news to share! Netmaker has officially embraced open source. This momentous decision was unveiled at the Open Source Summit in Europe when the pull request successfully merged, transitioning their server from the SSPL to the widely recognized Apache License 2.0.

While we've encountered some challenges and worked with vendors like Cisco to find solutions, I'm curious about recommendations for SD-WAN providers that are well-suited for SASE users. This includes not only Zscaler but also other options like Netmaker, Palo Alto, Cloudflare, Cisco, and Forcepoint.

Now, my main question is how I can link my DDNS host endpoint with my EC2 instances, allowing only my home network to access them. I've come across a variety of suggestions, such as Netmaker, OpenVPN, Tailscale etc. but I'm curious to hear your opinions on these solutions.

HN is somehow always timely. Currently, these folks expect me to sign a CLA for a one-byte change to their README: https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker/pull/2516

(I am a Nebula maintainer.) We recently merged support for gVisor-based services, although it's very new, and I don't know of much experimentation that's been done with it yet: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/pull/965

Nebula, originally from Slack[0].

Wireguard rightly gets a lot of attention, but Nebula is a really simple and easy to deploy mesh network that is often overlooked.

It does lack a management GUI and that stuff is very much DIY.

[0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Fair enough about the android mobile client... My use case only involves meshing linux appliances across various networks so we only need the nebula core binaries which are under MIT license

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/blob/master/LICENSE

That's not at all confusing with Slack's Nebula. https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Sounds like a bunch of your pain points are just related to needing an online CA or ICA. But, looking through the Nebula docs I don't know that it supports things like CRL addresses where you could host the CRL, or OCSP responders. Someone got support for an OCSP responder but never submitted a PR with completed code: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/72

Nebula is a scalable, cross-platform overlay networking tool focused on performance, simplicity, and security. This portable tool is equally adapted for linking a small number of computers or scaling to connect tens of thousands. It integrates encryption, security groups, certificates, and tunneling into a powerful, cohesive connectivity solution. Thanks for the recommendation go to jmeador42.

Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit it:

The folks over at Slack had an interesting discussion regarding the the "battle of the VPNs" article published by Netmaker I sourced in my parent comment:

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/discussions/911

Interesting. I thought recognized the logo, apparently seems to be a commercial support offering of https://github.com/slackhq/nebula and they support the "nebula" iOS app. I had been using for nebula/defined in the past.

Nebula: Is super easy to get running. It uses an interesting angle, working on the service and not just the device level. Unfortunately their NAT support seems to be still quite problematic and I am not going to maintain all those forwarded ports manually. There is a PR to support PCP but even if that ever gets applied I am not sure how well that will play with older routers. While it should be battle proven at slack, the community seems to be not that active. It still has the in-house tool that just got released.

The catch is that I want this to be reliable and fault tolerant, so if some of the game servers in the network go down, the remaining online servers should still always be able to receive broadcasts from any other online server. The servers can also be in multiple geographic locations and I am planning on using a mesh overlay network like Nebula to connect them. Essentially each pair of online servers will likely have a secure link between them that goes directly through the underlying network.