Introducing Vortex: A Stateless Tunneling Service

One of the more convenient developer tools is an instant public URL for a website or app running locally on your dev machine.

Ngrok, LocalTunnel, Serveo, and others dramatically simplified the process for exposing local servers to the public internet by tunneling through any NAT or firewall. Tools such as these are easy to use and have become invaluable for testing mobile apps, building webhook consumers, and demoing websites without deploying.

One challenge that is becoming increasingly more common is that some organizations are not permitting stateful tunneling solutions. Why?

Persistent tunnels may provide a mechanism to circumvent the firewall security policies, creating a security concern for I.T. teams. Systems behind the organization’s firewall can get exposed to the internet without I.T.’s knowledge.

Part of the corporate risk portfolio associated with some other methods (e.g. SSH, VPN, PPTP, etc), is the possibility for data exfiltration, where the tunnel may hide unauthorized communications for malware and potentially increase risk in back tunneling (e.g. SSH back tunneling). Because of this, we are seeing companies blacklist solutions that expose local servers using these types of back tunnels.

We decided to simplify these back tunneling solutions and create a stateless methodology for providing you with an instant secure public URL without the NetOps concerns.

Vortex allows you to create a custom, secure public URL to your localhost server without using stateful tunnels. Vortex utilizes a stateless store-and-forward technique to remove the need for long-lived connections.

SEE THE DOCS

This means you can use a Vortex Instant Domain to build your MS Teams chatbot at your Fortune 500 company. Or for testing your mobile app with your offshore development team. Or for demoing websites at your dev school.

We have customers using Vortex in these and a variety of other situations.

To make things even a little easier on you, your Vortex URL is static—meaning we will not randomly change it every couple of hours. Your domain is yours.

You can get started in just a couple of minutes.

TRY IT OUT

Try VORTEX free and let us know what you think! See vortexhub.io for more info.

I am the founder of vortexhub.io