Ave's Blog

Introduction

bigbigvpn is an ephemeral VPN self-hosting managing system. You give it API keys from your favorite VPS providers, and it allows you to get VPNs on all countries they support.

You pick a country, hit connect, and in a minute or so it finishes setting everything up and automatically connects you to the VPN. You disconnect (or be offline for a configurable amount of time), and it automatically deletes the server.

You get the best of both worlds, with very low prices, dynamic IPs, large amount of locations AND the comfort of self-hosting.

It mostly started as a “would be nice” and then quickly turned into a quick 6 hour PoC. I stopped working on it for a while, but picked it back up to add more features as I ended up using it more and more, and I finally feel like I'm comfortable sharing what I accomplished so far alongside some thoughts about the whole concept.

I was supposed to post this 2 weeks ago (even said so on twitter), but life happened, and I decided to delay the PoC until it got to a state where it represented the whole potential, and that's the state now.

Demos

Please note that this is just a PoC at the moment, and while it works fairly well, it's not as polished as I'd like:

As a note, bigbigvpn can currently have providers configured with a weight value. While both DigitalOcean and Hetzner provide servers in Germany (and I have them both configured), in the video it automatically picked Hetzner there as I had a higher weight set on it.

Post release edit: My very cool friends Mary and Linuxgemini had some ideas and helped implement them, and now server spin up takes significantly less, down to ~30-40s on hetzner.

(Also available as some asciinema recordings: Connecting to a server on Hetzner, Connecting to a server on scaleway, Getting region list)

Conclusions from the “experiment”

(Please do note that I have a conflict of interest as the developer of the project.)

I do think that the idea of ephemeral VPN servers is fairly viable as long as you're willing to wait 60-90s for a server to spin up, are okay with the fact that there's little to no tooling or clients right now, and most importantly, need the benefits it provides.

Many VPS providers offer hourly pricing, and most of them (that I've used) just charge for one hour when you initially spin them up, though there's some exceptions (like Scaleway). This makes them quite viable for short term use.

There are some stuff that can be improved from a technical perspective that I intend to address (see the next section), but even with those covered, several shortcomings remain:

• Your IP is still not shared with others, though you're not on the same one all the time. This is a step up from traditional self-hosting.
• Some VPS providers (Hetzner etc) don't give you a random IP on every server creation, but seem to effectively reserve an IP to hand out back to your next server creation for a while after you delete it. This is good if you accidentally fat fingered the prod server away, and bad if you're looking for a VPN service with dynamic IPs.
• Many commercial VPN services have tons of locations, and the 3 VPS providers bigbigvpn currently supports add up to “just” 11 countries. Even if more providers were added, it might not be possible to get to a similar number of countries.
• Compared to both commercial VPN services and self-hosting, payments can get very segmented depending on how many providers you enable.
• Compared to commercial VPN services, registering is a slower process, and in many cases can involve a KYC process (Hetzner required me to send over my passport several years ago, and Scaleway is slowly rolling out ID verification too). This may not be desirable to all, but it's a compromise I'm okay with, the saying does go “Be gay, be law abiding” after all.

Going forward

Overall, bigbigvpn was intended to be quick experiment that I'd stop thinking about after a few hours, but after I talked about it with friends, quite a few of them expressed that it may be actually useful, and as such I do intend to continue working on it. It's quite fun anyways :)

Right now, bigbigvpn code is not something I'm ready to publish. While most of the server related bits are fairly clean (and as such will be carried over), web bits were fairly rushed, and I still make breaking changes to the API on a regular basis.

I have significant changes in mind and will do a complete redesign of many parts of it, and intend to open source the proper implementation early on in the development cycle.

Some of the changes I want to make include:

• Multiple device support per server/location, so you can connect from both your phone and PC at the same time, or even add your friend to your current VPN box.
• Multiple user support, so you don't have to also pay a server to manage the server-side code if you don't want to. We'll probably host an instance on lavatech too.
• Better accounting for pricing schemes (for example, Scaleway charges for first 3 hours on DEV1-S spinup, so it doesn't make sense to delete server until that time)
• More clients, most notably mobile clients.
• Support for more providers, or perhaps even just terraform.
• Preparing images and just creating VPSes from those to have faster start times. I also intend to experiment with optimizing other parts of the process to minimize the spinup time.

I'll likely be publishing the repositories under https://gitlab.com/bigbiglarge and if there's enough interest I may post more updates here in my blog.

Thanks for reading this post! I've also posted some parts I cut out from this blog post (like how we got the idea, why I want this etc) over in my side blog in case you want to read more.

(tag: #bigbigvpn)