Show HN: Novanode, Global load balancing with Caddy, no vendor lock-in

19 hours ago

I've been a long-time Cloudflare user, but sometimes I just want a global load balancer without the lock-in and with full configuration control (e.g., some Cloudflare rules require an enterprise plan).

I love Caddy for its easy configuration, and that's why I created Novnaode. It makes it easy to launch hosted Caddy instances (with Nginx coming soon) and puts you fully in control of how to manage the configurations.

No more being restricted by enterprise tiers or limited configuration options - just simple, powerful, and flexible global load balancing.

Check it out here: https://novanode.sh

27 comments

martianE

Reply
mlhpdx  18 hours ago

Disclosure: I'm building https://proxylity.com, but I'm seeking to understand here, not to promote it.

The fixed cost per region seems like a barrier to experimenters and large development teams alike. It's not much in the grand scheme, but enough to prohibit an individual from standing something up on a whim and leaving it around. Likewise, for large development teams having a stack for every developer would be costly. In each case I'm not talking about "production" workload, but the semi-idle stacks that run for long periods, are critical, need to reflect the production setup, and don't generate revenue.

Your LBs are quick to deploy, which is super important for fluid CI/CD experience but they miss the mark without being usage based.

Do others see this the same way?

  • martianE  18 hours ago

    Yeah, honestly we didn't want to go with the IaaS/cloudflare style pricing model, we give you full fly.io nodes and control of them and forward the cost. Keeps things simple and without the tricks. I can see what you're saying though

quicksilver03  18 hours ago

What technique are you using for redirecting traffic to region B when region A is offline? And what happens if I have 2 nodes in a region and one goes offline?

  • martianE  18 hours ago

    For high-availability deployments, we leverage Fly.io's global Anycast network and DNS-based health checks. When a machine in region A goes offline, Fly's Anycast routing automatically directs traffic to healthy machines in other regions without manual intervention.

    For intra-region redundancy, we deploy 2 nodes per region in HA mode. If one node fails, traffic is seamlessly routed to the other node in the same region through Fly.io's internal load balancing. This provides N+1 redundancy within each region, ensuring service continuity even during single-node failures.

codegeek  18 hours ago

I love Caddy. Correct me if I am wrong but this looks like a hosted Caddy primarily for Load Balancing ? What about things like SSL termination or general reverse proxy capabilities ?

I would be interested in a hosted caddy cluster that lets me configure everything that Caddy provides without needing to fiddle with Caddyfiles or its API directly.

  • martianE  18 hours ago

    Our goal is actually not to hide the configs behind a bunch of partial UI elements you get full control of your proxy. All your caddy configs should work out of the box. For SSL termination we use acme and you can use the dns method (let us know if you dns provider isn't in the plugins and we'll add it)

    Pretty much the only thing we add is a storage layer for your certs so you avoid the acme rate limit for multi-region deployments

    • SparkyMcUnicorn  17 hours ago

      This addresses questions I had about certificate generation across nodes/regions.

      Slightly off topic, but something nice about Caddy is that it automatically falls back on ZeroSSL (if you have an email address defined) when you hit letsencrypt rate limits. I have a case where more certificates for a root domain are needed than LE is capable of providing, and this fallback solves for the rate limit problem seamlessly.

metadat  18 hours ago

How is "Novnaode" pronounced? How did you come up with this name?

Thanks for sharing your project!

Edit: Ah, thanks @evanjrowley! I'm glad it was a typo, because otherwise the name would have doomed this baby :)

trevorhinesley  18 hours ago

This is excellent, but I'm not following how the multi-region deployments work. Is Anycast involved in this somehow?

  • mlhpdx  18 hours ago

    Maybe a comparison to AWS Global Accelerator would be helpful to understand the "global" aspect. Having instances in multiple regions is just a starting point.

    • trevorhinesley  17 hours ago

      Ahhh got it, this is focusing primarily on load balancing at a lower layer of routing then than what I'm referring to. While not wrong, "global load balancing" threw me off a bit.

      EDIT: see the other reply, appears that it handles both given it leverages Fly's Anycast setup.

revskill  17 hours ago

I don't get it. So i have a VPS , then what ?

  • martianE  17 hours ago

    Our product assumes familiarity with Caddy/Nginx -- we'll make it more accessible soon. We give you global anycast nodes on it and you're in full control of the config (they can be edited on the website), so anything you can have in a Caddy config can be used on Novanode.

    The managed bits are the certs/configs/failover so that you don't need to be concerned about that.

    Though for a single VPS instance it could makes sense to just host your own caddy on that node. If you need global distribution Novanode is a good answer.

  • csdvrx  17 hours ago

    Get 2 VPS, put your DNS on both (ns1, ns2), use low TTL values, use geolocalization or a rough rule of thumb to have each redirect traffic to the VPS the closest to your client or with the least load

    Finally, make each VPS check on the health of the other to stop its DNS pointing to the other VPS: you will already have to have them check on eachother for the load checks.

    It's a fun and practical exercise (you may have to write your own DNS servers), after which you can then think on how to do that for more than 2 VPS and the algorithms it entails