We need to know the correct Mongo URI for the Pritunl node to start up with, otherwise it won’t be able to identify other nodes to coordinate with.

In order to be able to do this, there were a few problems to solve: While this is fine for most users, we wanted a VPN solution that was as hands off as possible. In addition to that, due to the manual nature of adding new nodes to the cluster, Pritunl can’t easily autoscale out of the box. While deploying an HA Pritunl configuration is much easier than other systems, it’s still a manual process.

Pritunl also has built in auditing of user activity as well as visualization of the load on your deployment.Īll of this sounds great, so what’s the problem? The problem It’s also more secure than OpenVPN’s alternative, because Pritunl will create temporary, authorized download links for users to retrieve their personal credentials, whereas in normal OpenVPN deployments credentials have to be shared in some manner (via USB, email, etc). It also has single sign on, which makes getting users set up with their credentials much easier than with OpenVPN.

We love Pritunl at Mixmax - it’s relatively simple to setup and it’s built to be highly available.

Today we’re going to talk about autoscaling Pritunl - our preferred VPN solution at Mixmax. To ensure these issues never arise, VPNs either need to be oversized or they need to be able to autoscale - they must be highly available (HA). When there is even the slightest issue though, everyone notices - accessing internal portals takes an appreciable amount of time due to large latency spikes, teams have difficulty interacting on private resources due to flakey connections. When they work well, no one knows that they’re there. Every security minded organization knows the need for a secure manner to access their private networks, but even in this modern “Infrastructure as a Service” world, VPNs often have to be built manually.

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