Secure Tunnel
For customers running on bare metal, on-premises, or other non-cloud providers tunnels provides a way to secure your backend without mTLS or IAM.
The way this system works is by deploying a small service inside your network or VPC that makes a secure outbound connection to Zuplo's infrastructure. Your Zuplo API Gateway can then use this tunnel to securely route traffic to your private API. The benefits of a secure tunnel are:
- Because the tunnel makes an outbound connection, there is no need for your API to be exposed on the internet at all.
- All traffic between Zuplo and your API is fully encrypted.
- You eliminate the need to configure complex ingress, firewall, or other types of policies to route traffic into your API. Simply install the tunnel and Zuplo takes care of the rest.
How does the Tunnel Work?#
The Zuplo tunnel can run on virtually any infrastructure. The most common way users install the tunnel is as a Docker container, but we can provide you a build in virtually any format (i.e. an Azure VM, etc.). The tunnel itself is a lightweight service that when started makes an outbound connection to the Zuplo network and then through to your Zuplo Gateway.
When the tunnel service connects to the Zuplo network traffic from your gateway
can be routed to internal services running in your network or VPC. For example,
if your API is running on the internal DNS address external-api.local, the
tunnel will route traffic from the Zuplo API Gateway to your internal service
based only on the code and policies you have set up in your Zuplo Gateway.
The example below illustrates how the Zuplo tunnel would be configured in an AWS ECS Cluster. Notice that there is no public IP address or ingress traffic in this configuration. This is a completely private VPC. The tunnel makes an outbound connection to the Zuplo Gateway and then uses internal DNS to route requests to the Private API.
Is this Secure?#
Zuplo builds on top of many different tools to ensure that your gateway and API stay secure. Each tunnel uses a secret key that allows it to securely connect to Zuplo's network. Under the hood, Zuplo relies on Cloudflare's network for establishing secure and reliable tunnel connections. Each tunnel is configured with unique access policies that allow only the Zuplo Gateway that you have authorized to make connections over that tunnel. Every incoming request is terminated using Cloudflare's network which provides sophisticated DDoS, bot, and threat protections. Next, the request is routed through your Zuplo Gateway which can be configured with all policies and code you require to control access to your API. By default, no requests will be routed from your gateway to your API until you configure routes, URL rewrites, and policies in your Gateway.
All traffic is terminated at the edge with SSL certificates and encrypted through the entire route to your API. All requests that your gateway makes to Zuplo's internal services like API Key Management or Rate Limiting are also transported over secure and encrypted tunnels.
Every request is logged and you can configure Zuplo's logs to push to the log service of your choice.
How will tunnels perform?#
Most customers are fine running two instances of the tunnel service for redundancy in the event one pod/service fails. Each tunnel is able to handle millions of requests per minute. For customers that require additional scale, simply increase the number of tunnel instances you are running or configure auto-scaling on your deployment. It is unlikely that the tunnel will become the bottleneck in your traffic before other factors, but if you do run into any issues contact support and we will work out a solution that meets your scale requirements.
How should I Configure the Tunnel?#
You should run your tunnel with an IAM role or other network policies that only allow the tunnel to make requests to the network services that you want your Gateway to access. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on your setup. IAM roles and internal service meshes are common means of controlling which services the tunnel can access. For example, at Zuplo we use Linkerd in our Kubernetes clusters as one mechanism for controlling what services are accessible to our tunnel deployment.
For details on how to configure a tunnel on your network see the setup guide.