inlets-pro

Inlets Pro is a Cloud Native Tunnel for L4 TCP traffic

You can use inlets-pro to tunnel out any TCP traffic from an internal network to another network. This could be green-to-green, or green-to-red, i.e. from internal/private to the Internet. It differs from Inlets OSS in that it works at the L4 of the TCP stack and has automatic TLS (auto-tls) encryption built-in.

Given the split control- and data-plane, you can also punch out endpoints into a remote cluster, which are kept private from the Internet, for instance when you need Command & Control, or orchestration of on-premises services, from a central cloud cluster.

Features

inlets-pro forwards TCP traffic over an encrypted websocket secured with TLS.

Support for any TCP protocol
Pass-through L4 proxy
Automatic TLS encryption for tunnel and control-port
Automatic port-detection, announced by client

Deployment options:

single static binary is available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux on armhf and ARM64
systemd support with automatic restarts
Native docker image available
Kubernetes integration via inlets-operator or YAML

Reference architecture

inlets-pro can be used to provide a Public VirtualIP to private, edge and on-premises services and Kubernetes clusters. Once you have set up one or more VMs or cloud hosts on public cloud, you can utilize their IP addresses with inlets-pro.

You can get incoming networking (ingress) to any:

Command & control of Point of Sale / IoT devices
SSH access to home-lab or Raspberry Pi
TCP services running on Linux, Windows or MacOS
The API of your Kubernetes cluster
A VM or Docker container

For example, rather than terminating TLS at the edge of the tunnel, inlets-pro can forward the TLS traffic on port 443 directly to your host, where you can run a reverse proxy inside your network. At any time you can disconnect and reconnect the tunnel or even delete the remote VM without loosing your TLS certificate since it's stored locally.

Single private service with Public VirtualIP

For a single private on-premises Java API service, one exit-server is provisioned on public cloud, its Public IP is the VirtualIP for the private cluster. Ports 80 and 443 are forwarded to the Java API, which can serve its own TLS certificate.

Single private service with Highly-available, multi-zone Public VirtualIP and DNS

For a single private on-premises Java API service, two exit-servers are provisioned on public cloud, each with a Public VirtualIP. DNS is used to provide high-availability and fail-over. Ports 80 and 443 are forwarded to the Java API, which can serve its own TLS certificate.

Private Kubernetes Cluster, High-available Pod, public VirtualIP

Example: A private or on-premises Kubernetes cluster serving traffic from a Node.js Pod on port 3000. An IngressController performs TLS termination and stores a certificate within the private cluster. The certificate can be obtained from LetsEncrypt using standard tooling such as cert-manager.

Get started

You can follow one of the tutorials above, or use inlets-pro in three different ways:

As a stand-alone binary which you can manage manually, or automate
Through inletsctl which creates an exit server with inlets-pro server running with systemd in one of the cloud / IaaS platforms such as AWS EC2 or DigitalOcean
Through inlets-operator - the operator runs on Kubernetes and creates an exit server running inlets-pro server and a Pod in your cluster running inlets-pro client. The lifecycle of the client and server and exit-node are all automated.

Tutorials and examples

In this example we will forward ports 80 and 443 from the exit-node to the IngressController running within the cluster. We could forward anything that can be transported over TCP i.e. TLS, MongoDB, SSH, Redis, or whatever you want.

Get the binary

Both the client and server are contained within the same binary. It is recommended that you use inletsctl, or inlets-operator to access inlets-pro, but you can also work directly with its binary or Docker image.

The inlets-pro binary can be obtained as a stand-alone executable, or via a Docker image.

As a binary:

curl -SLsf https://github.com/inlets/inlets-pro/releases/download/0.4.3/inlets-pro > inlets-pro
chmod +x ./inlets-pro

Or fetch via inletsctl download --pro

Or find a binary for a different architecture on the releases page

Docker

A docker image is published at inlets/inlets-pro:0.5.1
Kubernetes YAML files

A client and server YAML file are also available as samples

Or you can see the CLI reference guide

License

inlets OSS is a free, L7 HTTP tunnel project available for use under the MIT license.

inlets-pro is a L4 TCP tunnel, service proxy, and load-balancer product distributed under a commercial license.

In order to use inlets-pro, you must accept the End User License Agreement - EULA. The server component runs without a license key, but the client requires a valid license. A license can be purchased from OpenFaaS Ltd after completing a trial.

Professional services are also available if you would like to conduct a paid proof-of-concept or to obtain a custom reference architecture. Just ask us how we can help.

Getting a license key

Accept the End User License Agreement - EULA
Start a 14-day trial today
Receive your license via email from OpenFaaS Ltd
Use community support if required via OpenFaaS Slack in the #inlets channel

After completing your trial, please contact sales@openfaas.com for a quote and to purchase a commercial-license.

doowb/inlets-pro