Every developer who has worked on web applications has faced the same problem: you build something locally, it works perfectly, and then you need to share it with someone — a teammate, a client, a stakeholder — and suddenly you're wrestling with firewall rules, NAT traversal, dynamic IPs, and VPN configurations.
The Problem We Kept Hitting
Tunneling tools have existed for years, and they solve the basic connectivity problem well enough. But as we scaled our own infrastructure, we kept running into the same friction points:
- Security was always an afterthought — no WAF, no per-endpoint access control, no audit logging
- Traffic management was primitive — no load balancing, no caching, no traffic policies
- Billing was confusing — everything was an add-on, and the final price was always 3-5x the advertised rate
- Visibility was limited — you could see requests, but not analyze patterns or detect anomalies
- Multi-region deployments required separate accounts and manual DNS management
What We Wanted
We wanted a single command — ngris http 3000 — that would give us a production-grade edge gateway, not just a tunnel. That meant:
Security built in
A real WAF with 18 rule types across 4 phases, not just basic IP filtering.
Identity & access
Per-endpoint RBAC with OAuth, SAML, and basic auth out of the box.
AI-powered analysis
Automatic traffic analysis that can generate WAF rules from patterns.
Transparent pricing
Everything included. No hidden add-ons for WAF, custom domains, or OAuth.
The Architecture
Ngris is built as a cloud-native platform with microservices at its core. The tunnel-server handles agent connections and data forwarding using HTTP/2 multiplexing. The API server provides the management plane. The control plane coordinates everything. And the agent — a lightweight binary you run locally — maintains persistent connections to the nearest edge region.
This isn't a weekend project stitched together with reverse proxies. It's a production system designed to handle millions of concurrent connections with proper observability, billing, and security from day one.
What's Next
We're just getting started. On the roadmap: more edge regions, HTTP/3 support, a marketplace for community WAF rules, and a self-hosted option for teams that need it.
If you've been frustrated by the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it's production-ready," give Ngris a try. It takes 30 seconds to get started:
ngris http 3000
That's it. Your local server is now behind a production edge gateway with WAF, auth, and traffic management. No configuration files, no YAML hell, no credit card required.