August 2025 Summaries

Secrets for Traffic Policy, an update from ngrok, is now in Open Beta, as announced by Product Manager Brian Melton-Grace. With a strong background in cybersecurity, SDKs, and authentication protocols, Brian has held previous roles at Microsoft, McGraw-Hill, and Information Control Corporation. This announcement highlights ngrok’s commitment to enhancing their product offerings, allowing users to engage with the new feature set in its beta phase. The update aims to improve user experience and functionality by providing advanced tools for managing traffic policy efficiently.

ngrok, a company known for its secure tunneling software, has achieved HIPAA compliance, marking a significant milestone in its security and trust credentials. This compliance ensures that ngrok meets the standards required to handle sensitive healthcare information, making it a viable option for healthcare providers and related businesses needing secure data management solutions. Arianna Willett, the Senior Director of Security Risk & Trust at ngrok, played a pivotal role in this achievement, leveraging her extensive experience in building security programs for prominent companies like Twilio, Okta, and Deloitte. This development was shared broadly across multiple platforms, highlighting ngrok's commitment to maintaining high security and trust standards.

Joel Hans, ngrok's Developer Relations lead, discusses the implementation of self-hosted local AI workflows using Docker, n8n, Ollama, and ngrok. The article emphasizes the use of these technologies to create efficient and flexible AI integrations that can be managed and operated locally. By leveraging Docker for containerization, n8n for workflow automation, Ollama for AI model deployment, and ngrok for secure tunneling, users can establish robust AI systems without relying on external cloud services. Joel shares insights into the practical applications of these tools, highlighting their potential to streamline processes and enhance the capabilities of AI solutions in a self-contained environment.

Ravi Devarajan, an Engineering Manager for Developer Growth at ngrok, discusses a product update that allows users to terminate requests to their endpoints using a close-connection action. This feature is part of ngrok's traffic policy product updates and aims to enhance the control developers have over their endpoint connections. The update is shared across various platforms, indicating its significance and relevance to software engineering and developer communities.

Smithery is pioneering the development of an agent-first internet, focusing on creating a seamless integration for both builders and bots within this digital landscape. Joel Hans, the DevRel lead at ngrok, highlights the significance of this approach in enhancing the functionality and interaction between various digital agents, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize how builders and bots collaborate. This concept aims to facilitate more efficient and effective communication and operation by prioritizing the needs and capabilities of digital agents in the internet ecosystem.

Nijiko Yonskai discusses a new feature in API gateway traffic management, introducing Web Application Firewall (WAF) actions designed to block threats before they reach services. This enhancement aims to improve security by intercepting potential threats at the gateway level, thereby protecting internal systems and services. Yonskai, who is a Principal Product Manager at ngrok with prior experience at Kong and Postman, emphasizes the significance of these new WAF actions in enhancing the overall user experience by safeguarding against security vulnerabilities. The feature is promoted across various platforms, highlighting its importance and reach in the tech community.

Version 0.19.0 of the ngrok-operator helm chart introduces enhancements to the Gateway API, refined domain retention controls, and the deprecation of certain custom resource definitions (CRDs), indicating progress towards a v1 release. The update improves the integration with tools like ExternalDNS by populating the .Status.Addresses field with either the ngrok managed domain or CNAME, while also setting status conditions on gateways to provide clearer feedback on configuration validity. These status conditions are now recognized by Argo CD, aiding in debugging configurations. A new defaultDomainReclaimPolicy helm value allows users to specify whether domains should be deleted or retained when corresponding CRs are removed. Additionally, certain CRDs are deprecated in favor of a streamlined feature set under new CRDs like CloudEndpoint and AgentEndpoint, aligning with ngrok’s shift from Edges to Endpoints by the year's end.

At ngrok, developers navigate a complex monorepo using the "nd" CLI tool, which simplifies the software development lifecycle by acting as a contract for building, testing, and deploying software across various technologies like Go, TypeScript, and Scala. Designed to mimic production environments, nd facilitates seamless service interactions without requiring developers to understand complex build or deploy processes. It integrates with tools like direnv, nix, and Bazel to manage developer environments and enhance build efficiency through features like incremental caching. Ngrok emphasizes transparency and adaptability within nd, allowing developers to view and adjust underlying commands and contribute improvements. The tool provides comprehensive support through features like introspection, error messaging, and diagnostics, fostering self-sufficiency and reducing support burdens. Continuous improvements focus on expanding Bazel integration and refining error handling to further streamline developer workflows.

The text explores how various engineers at ngrok utilize the company's own software to manage and secure their personal homelabs and self-hosted projects, introducing the concept of "homefooding" or "doglabbing." Christian uses ngrok and Traffic Policy to host a privacy-focused analytics tool called umami, securing it with OAuth and specific IP rules. James standardizes authentication and routing by creating a central policy for all endpoints using ngrok's Kubernetes Operator and CloudEndpoint CRD. Stacks leverages ngrok's Traffic Policy for secure access to his home Kubernetes projects without exposing his network. Ryan sets up a photo-sharing service using immich and OIDC, ensuring only trusted users access his home network. Euan implements a serverless URL shortener using ngrok's internal endpoints, showcasing a creative application of the software. The text illustrates how ngrok employees creatively employ the service for personal use, emphasizing security, efficiency, and innovation in their approaches.

The recently launched ngrok Docker Desktop Extension, now available in the Docker Extensions Marketplace, offers a graphical user interface to make containers publicly accessible, facilitating the testing and sharing of prototypes, APIs, and web applications. This extension allows users to create public endpoints for locally running containers with just a few clicks, and configurations are saved locally for easy reactivation. It incorporates ngrok's Traffic Policy, enabling users to enforce access controls and define routing behaviors based on various request attributes. The extension also automatically detects the protocol of the containerized application, configuring the appropriate endpoint whether it's HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP, with minimal manual setup required. For those integrating ngrok into workflows or CI pipelines, official Docker images of the ngrok agent are available for seamless integration. Users can install the extension from the Docker Desktop Marketplace, access source code on GitHub, and find additional documentation to aid in usage.

Ngrok has undergone a significant transformation by dogfooding its own product, transitioning from using nginx configurations to utilizing ngrok's capabilities as a comprehensive API gateway. Initially relying on nginx for routing and hosting services like their Python-based website and Go REST API, ngrok faced the challenge of increasing complexity and the need to provide ingress to various applications. By leveraging new features such as Traffic Policy and Endpoints in ngrok, the company was able to replace nginx's functionalities, including TLS termination, logging, custom headers, and path-based redirects, simplifying the infrastructure and enhancing operational efficiency. This transition allowed ngrok to bypass AWS networks, utilize global load balancing, and enable self-service changes by other teams, thereby improving performance and empowering internal users. The process of dogfooding helped ngrok refine its product while maintaining a continual feedback loop, and the company plans to expand this approach by integrating additional features like custom responses, rate limiting, and IP intelligence to further enhance its service offerings.

Ngrok has been officially launched on the Microsoft Store, offering Windows users a secure and up-to-date installation option with automatic updates and compatibility with application management tools and Windows Defender. This move ensures that the binary is reliable, and it is also available via WinGet, providing the same benefits. However, users are advised against using the outdated version in the winget-pkgs repository, as efforts are underway to update it. Additionally, ngrok now supports installation through the Scoop package manager, allowing command-line installation with minimal friction, though issues with this method may prompt users to prefer the Microsoft Store or WinGet installations.