Cloudflare is proud to partner with Mesosphere on their new Argo Tunnel offering available within their DC/OS (Data Center / Operating System) catalogue! Before diving deeper into the offering itself, we’ll first do a quick overview of the Mesophere platform, DC/OS.

What is Mesosphere and DC/OS?

Mesosphere DC/OS provides application developers and operators an easy way to consistently deploy and run applications and data services on cloud providers and on-premise infrastructure. The unified developer and operator experience across clouds makes it easy to realize use cases like global reach, resource expansion, and business continuity.

In this multi cloud world Cloudflare and Mesosphere DC/OS are great complements. Mesosphere DC/OS provides the same common services experience for developers and operators, and Cloudflare provides the same common service access experience across cloud providers. DC/OS helps tremendously for avoiding vendor lock-in to a single provider, while Cloudflare can load balance traffic intelligently (in addition to many other services) at the edge between providers. This new offering will allow you to load balance through the use of Argo Tunnel.



Quick Tunnel Refresh

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel is a private connection between your services and Cloudflare. Tunnel makes it such that only traffic that routes through the Cloudflare network can reach your service.

Cloudflare’s lightweight Argo Tunnel daemon creates an encrypted Tunnel between your origin web server and Cloudflare’s nearest data center — all without opening any public inbound ports. In other words, it’s a private link. Only Cloudflare can see the service and communicate with it, and for the rest of the internet, the service is reachable only through the hostname configured on Cloudflare. Check this out if you’d like to learn more.

By using Argo Tunnel, DC/OS is able to load balance your traffic to any of your hosts, wherever they are running on Earth, in any cloud provider! Need more instances in Paris? Just launch them! Are instances more affordable in a specific provider? Just launch them there, and thanks to Argo Tunnel and DC/OS your traffic will be directed to exactly where it belongs.

Requirements

In order to use this application in DC/OS you must have a zone on Cloudflare with the Argo service enabled. Argo can be enabled for any plan type and is billed on usage. Because this application requires the use of a DC/OS ‘secrets’ the Enterprise version of DC/OS is required. To get started on Cloudflare please see here and sign up for an account. To do the same with DC/OS, please see here.

Cloudflare Argo Tunnel Support for DC/OS

Argo Tunnel is the fast way to make services that run on DC/OS private agents (that are only bound to the DC/OS internal network) accessible over the public internet.

When you launch the Tunnel for your service, it creates persistent outbound connections to the 2 closest Cloudflare PoPs over which the entire Cloudflare network will route through to reach the service associated with the Tunnel. There is no need to configure DNS, update a NAT configuration, or modify firewall rules (connections are outbound). The Argo Tunnel exposed service gets all the benefits offered by the Cloudflare network (e.g. DDoS protection, CDN and performance, TLS, etc.).

The Cloudflare Argo Tunnel Service is available from Mesosphere DC/OS catalog.

Configuration of the Argo Tunnel requires you to specify three things.

Cloudflare Hostname - The DNS name of your service on the Cloudflare network. This is the address where you wish your service to be available from on the Internet. (Note: adding a zone to Cloudflare is extremely simple, you can get started here (link: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/)

Local Service Url - The local URL of the service that you want to make available, on the machines running Argo Tunnel.

Load Balancer Pool - The load balancer pool you want the service to be part of. Use any value you like, keeping the value consistent for tunnels you wish to load balance traffic onto as a unit. Inside Cloudflare you can manage how your traffic is balanced between and inside your pools.

Assuming you do that setup for a service in a West Coast DC/OS cluster and an East Coast DC/OS cluster, with a respective us-west and us-east LB pool, then you end up with a Cloudflare load balancer globally balancing traffic between these clusters. The load balancer can be configured to do geosteering, which you can learn more about here.

For more details see the DC/OS Argo Tunnel documentation. We hope this partnership is a meaningful step towards a simple multi-cloud solution for DC/OS customers.

To sign up for Cloudflare click here and to sign up for DC/OS click here. This partnership between Cloudflare and Mesosphere we hope will help you drive private secure and performant multi cloud deployments