Transform connectivity with ngrok: A strategic edge for modern enterprises
By Chad Tindel
March 21, 2024
By Chad Tindel
March 21, 2024
In the rapidly changing landscape of digital transformation, ngrok stands out as a pioneering force, reshaping the way organizations build, deploy, secure, and monitor their digital services. Our position as a cutting-edge application-layer proxy, fortified with TLS termination capabilities at the network's edge, furnishes us with distinct advantages over conventional VPNs. This edge transcends mere security enhancements; it encapsulates a comprehensive suite of potent tools designed to meet the multifaceted needs of application developers, operations teams, and security experts. This arsenal propels efficiency, fosters innovation, and fortifies security across the entire organizational spectrum.
At ngrok, our deep understanding of varying network needs and use cases has shaped our support for HTTPS, TLS, and TCP traffic into a hierarchical framework, ensuring our platform's robust versatility and power. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, ngrok can proxy traffic for any TCP protocol-based application or API with global acceleration and multi-region load balancing (see our Global Server Load Balancing docs), DDOS protection with our Next Generation Firewall, and can apply security policies like IP restrictions so only approved servers can connect to your application. As you move up the protocol hierarchy ngrok is able to understand more of the traffic and thus able to add more rich functionality. For example, with TLS endpoints ngrok can generate, manage, and rotate your TLS certificates for you, apply authentication policies like mutual TLS authentication (mTLS), and gives you full control over where in the stack TLS termination happens. HTTPS, positioned at the pinnacle of this hierarchy, benefits from ngrok's complete range of features, encompassing advanced authentication (OAuth, OIDC, SAML) as well as traffic inspection and manipulation capabilities. With ngrok terminating HTTPS/TLS at our edge we can provide functions like request and response header modifications, body transformations, and our request playback feature, significantly easing development and debugging processes.
Developers thrive on innovation because they feel more pressure than ever to ship new things faster, and ngrok equips them with the tools to push boundaries. By choosing ngrok for HTTPS traffic, developers unlock the ability to modify request and response headers and bodies, play back requests for debugging, and log traffic to external observability platforms or ngrok's own Traffic Insights dashboard. Our recently released API Gateway functionality streamlines the development process by offering an intuitive interface (both in the dashboard as well as via our APIs) for managing API endpoints, built in API rate limiting, the ability to verify JSON Web Tokens (JWT) at our cloud edge, and much more. This means developers can easily define, publish, maintain, and secure APIs in a more organized and efficient manner. This level of control and visibility accelerates development cycles, facilitates troubleshooting, and ensures that new applications can be brought to market with speed and confidence.
While developers feel pressure to ship quickly, operations teams bear the crucial responsibility of maintaining service availability, reliability, and peak performance. ngrok's application-layer proxying equips these teams with unmatched visibility into application traffic, granting them the ability to monitor and address issues in real-time. This capability is critical for routing traffic efficiently, performing content-based load balancing, and integrating with advanced observability tools for deep analysis. We also provide a powerful Traffic Policy module for a flexible and uniform approach to configuring and managing traffic across all ngrok platforms, whether it's the Cloud, API, SDKs, or Kubernetes.
Additionally, our enhanced logging capabilities, which allow for detailed traffic analysis on external platforms like Datadog or our native Traffic Insights dashboard, are indispensable for comprehensive observability and security monitoring. These features underscore ngrok's commitment to delivering an invaluable toolkit for over 7 million developers and growing, highlighting our pivotal role in the developer community. ngrok thus provides the operational agility necessary to sustain optimal service levels, ensuring that operational teams can achieve their objectives with precision and efficiency.
In the digital age, security demands constant vigilance and adaptability to counteract evolving threats. ngrok's TLS termination capability forms the bedrock for deep encrypted traffic inspection, paving the way for sophisticated security measures and potential integration with technologies such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). This strategy not only protects individual enterprises but also contributes to the broader internet ecosystem by facilitating the early detection and mitigation of emerging threats, thus enhancing the overall security landscape.
Recognizing the unique security and compliance needs of certain enterprises, ngrok offers a Private Edition. This solution allows organizations to leverage ngrok's full suite of features within their controlled environments, meeting stringent regulatory requirements without sacrificing functionality. Whether it's for compliance, security, or data sovereignty reasons, the Private Edition ensures that enterprises can benefit from ngrok's advanced capabilities on their terms.
ngrok provides unmatched flexibility in how traffic is managed through our platform. For those who prefer not to terminate HTTPS traffic at our edge, configuring traffic as a TLS endpoint allows it to pass through ngrok transparently to backend services. This setup, detailed in our documentation, ensures that ngrok can accommodate various operational and security preferences without compromising the integrity or confidentiality of the data.
ngrok's approach to connectivity, offering strategic advantages through application-layer proxying with TLS termination, sets a new standard for building, deploying, securing, and monitoring enterprise services. With features tailored to the needs of developers, operations teams, and security professionals, ngrok is driving forward the innovation and security that will shape the future of the internet. As we grow and evolve, our mission remains the same: to empower every organization to achieve its digital transformation goals, securely and efficiently.
You can sign up today and get started. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or encounter any issues. Connect with us on Twitter, the ngrok community on Slack, or contact us at support@ngrok.com.