Our great sponsors
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netbird
Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network with SSO/MFA and simple access controls.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
Hey HN,
This is Misha and Maycon from (finally) sunny Berlin. We built NetBird (https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird) - an open-source, peer-to-peer WireGuard-based private networking platform.
You'd probably say: "C'mon, there is a bunch of other similar solutions out there, and one more?" And you'd be right - there are a few, and there will be more. NetBird is not new and has been on the market since 2021 though.
We need more solutions like that because private networking is complex. But, luckily it has changed in the past few years, shifting toward simplicity with minimal configuration. Give it two-three years, and most IT pros won't use anything but 0-configuration networks to connect their multi-cloud, office, on-premise, and home environments. Simple connectivity will become a commodity.
But how is NetBird different?
First, here is our story. We started working on p2p networking technology as part of our privacy-focused home storage solution for personal data. The technology was aimed at individuals with no technical knowledge wanting to connect to their home network and access personal data like photos and documents securely end-to-end from anywhere in the world without involving third-party servers that could decrypt traffic. Our hardware went viral in early 2021. Some of you might remember this video from Jeff Geerling: https://youtu.be/ahrdx3TYxZc
The pandemic hit the semiconductor market, making it hard to produce hardware at scale, especially for small teams like ours. We realized that our p2p technology could be applied to corporate networks, saving hours for engineering teams. We paved a new direction for the company - a p2p overlay network, no hardware.
Second, simple and secure connectivity should be available to every company. Therefore NetBird is 100% open-source and self-hosted, including our network management service. BSD-3.
Third, NetBird uses kernel WireGuard and applies advanced NAT traversal techniques using Berkley Packet Filters (BPF) to "punch" a hole in the firewall and automatically configure a p2p connection between the machines, thus making the network fast, efficient, and secure.
Heads up to folks from Pion https://github.com/pion/ice.
Sixth, NetBird supports MFA and popular OpenID-compliant Identity Providers (IdP) like MS Azure, Okta, Google, Auth0, Keycloak, Zitadel, Authentik, etc. Available in the self-hosted version as well.
Seventh, NetBird is a European company headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Hence this might interest local European companies looking for local networking platforms.
Eighth, NetBird joined the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security incubator - the #1 cybersecurity research university. The program gives us direct access to cutting-edge research that we will use to optimize the technology.