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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

This... sounds like something I would be interested in, but I cannot for the life of me understand what this does.

Is this decentralized file sharing?

> zrok provides Private or Public, instant, secure tunneling of applications from anywhere.

Its a tunneling tool, to share a port/etc from one computer to another. You can connect to a computer, even if you don't directly have a route to it's IP.

> Secured effortlessly by using a zero trust overlay network provided by OpenZiti

It uses OpenZiti to accomplish the links, as opposed to tailscale, zero tier, cloudflare tunnels, Yggdrasil, etc.

> zrok allows sharing other types of resources; rather than just proxying http endpoints, zrok allows users to easily and rapidly share files and web content. zrok is also ready to be extended to easily support many kinds of decentralized resource sharing; zrok provides a framework that makes this kind of peer-to-peer resource sharing simple and secure

It looks like its also extensible, so you can use it to form the communication layer to share other things, files being one example.

this was an awesome, non-snarky, explanatory comment. thanks for this.

It's more peer to peer file sharing and web content sharing than truly distributed sharig but with a globally available service, it's "distributed" ina way. It's not doing sharding or anything fancy like that (yet anyway). Right now, it's a dev-focused tool similar to the other projects out there like ngrok/tailscale funnels/cloudflare tunnels etc. There's a fair number of them now-a-days. :) But it doesn't need to stay that way and might change.

This one is built on top of OpenZiti (I am a dev on that project) which is a secure, zero trust overlay network. It's fully self-hostable and open source which some people find attractive. The hosted version our company is sponsoring for free (at least 'for now').

The key goal is to make it super easy and safe to share files/web content.

On surface it looks similar to ngrok. Except you can self host this using the open source project openziti that support the infra for it. It seems to be either a wrapper or implemented using openziti

It seems to me that is some kind of tunnel/vpn a-la-zerotier?

Trying to keep it short, I would say OpenZiti is similar to zerotier moreso than zrok. This zrok tool though is closer to ngrok. I mentioned that in another comment so hopefully that's easy enough to find in the page.

In this video from 11 months ago, at 25 min. they say this:

“Ziti is only providing a pipe. That’s also very important. Some people might think that there is more going on there, but Ziti is literally, just… just a black hole, from one side to the other, and how it gets there… it’s like an SSH tunnel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyjM5y8Op_I&t=1509s

He goes on to say “I’m going say it publicly: my mission is to kill REST. […] I’m going to bring us all the way back to the 1990s, and we’re going to do RPC all over again”

The linked article is about Zrok, which seems to be an application on top of that OpenZiti overlay network on top of the Internet.

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