This feels very much like the classic dropbox vs ftp+svn comment. I don't think the point of CF Tunnel is some novel technical capability or performance, but convenience and having a service you don't need to worry about and not have a server that you need to maintain.
It's also a pattern to commodify things that used to be basic knowledge for any systems administrator. That is both good and bad; new generations of computer people don't know how their systems work or how to actually do certain things, on the other hand, it makes it more accessible to more people.
its also worth noting that evicting this common knowledge from our collective sysadmin brains doesn't just leave our brains unoccupied. Now we can worry about a new class of things. Making meat available at the grocery didn't mean suddenly our lack of hunting knowledge left a void of stupidity -- we learned new things to fill that time and energy we used to spend on common things.
That is true as well, but as with most double-edged swords there can be a downside in that people that used to have the deep knowledge can now be swapped out with "cheaper" people that do not, and will not (by choice or by policy) do something in addition to the remaining shallow tasks.
That said, a classic entry-level "sysadmin" job was just a "jargon translation" job between a vendor and the local implementation of the vendor's products quite often anyway. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I do think it makes for a waste of human potential just to keep the anonymous cogs of an organisation running.
Ngrok is one of those things that I know isn't that complex but I gladly pay for it year after year because I just don't want to deal with that stuff and it rarely lets me down.
Exactly, I’m running Cloudflare’s tunnel as a sidecar container in the kubernetes pods that need to be reachable from the internet. It’s a very convenient way of doing so, CloudFlare can even load balance it on their side, and it has been very stable.
It’s the convenience of it that is the big selling point to me.
Yep. The hardest part of a k8s cluster at home is ingress and storage. Previously I was using metallb and port forwarding, which worked ok, but not very reliably for various reasons. A cloudflare tunnel sidecar completely solved the ingress issues.
As I get older, I'm less inclined to look into a DIY way to solve a technical problem. Even if it's "not too complex". When I was younger and had more time to kill (aka stay up all night) that was cool. Sometimes I just wanna get a full night of sleep and am fine paying a small fee for access to a tool or service that I don't have to maintain or think about too much.
