Joel Hans
Joel is ngrok's DevRel lead. Away from blog posts, videos, and demo apps, you'll find him mountain biking, writing fiction, or digging holes in his yard.
Posts by Joel Hans
Showing 40 posts by Joel Hans.
How Vijil built a trust layer for my first AI agent
Vijil’s platform tests your in-development agents against failure modes like prompt injection, PII leaks, and hallucinations—with a bit of help from ngrok.
API gateway shapes: back then, now, and beyond
Explore eight new gateway patterns—from CI/CD previews to multi-model AI—that show why gateways are no longer prod-only infrastructure.
By Joel Hans
September 16, 2025
Self-hosted local AI workflows with Docker, n8n, Ollama, and ngrok
The shortest path to the best of all worlds: AI-driven automation, simple deployments with containers and a GUI, and a gateway to knit it all together securely.
By Joel Hans
August 20, 2025
Smithery is shaping the agent-first internet—for builders and bots alike
Smithery is building tools to help you build, test, and distribute your MCPs on one side, and a "Google for MCPs" on the other—here's how they do it with ngrok.
By Joel Hans
August 19, 2025
Five ways ngrokkers 'doglab' gateways for homelabs and side projects
How do they build gateways to route and authenticate traffic to blogs, OSS analytics services, photo-sharing apps, and much more with Traffic Policy?
How to write policies with patterns that scale
Tips for making your Traffic Policy easier to read, debug, and evolve, without rewriting it every time your requirements shift.
By Joel Hans
July 22, 2025
Use the load balancing power of Endpoint Pools for canary deploys and beyond
Load balancing isn't just for scaling replicas—see what else Endpoint Pools can do, like canaries and risk-free (or at least less risky!) gateway changes.
By Joel Hans
May 22, 2025
Battle against search and AI bots on your ngrok endpoints
Are search and AI bots invading your ngrok endpoints? Fight back with three developer-friendly traffic policies you can deploy in minutes.
Set variables in Traffic Policy for cleaner, reusable configs
Define lists, maps, and interpolated values inside your traffic management rules—then reference them anywhere—to make configs both simpler and more dynamic.
By Joel Hans
May 5, 2025
ngrok is also now your Kubernetes ingress
Simplify your Kubernetes ingress stack: global load balancing, DDoS protection, and flexible routing all built into ngrok’s Operator.
Tired of slow Kubernetes dev loops? Try local projection with bindings
Run your service on localhost, interact with it from any of your clusters—or all of them at once. ngrok makes the K8s dev loop feel magical again.
By Joel Hans
April 25, 2025
Terminate TLS however (and wherever) you want with Traffic Policy
Need custom certs? Want fast mTLS setup? ngrok’s terminate-tls action gives you complete TLS control from one declarative config.
By Joel Hans
April 23, 2025
Add secure ingress to the Kubernetes API and access it anywhere
Want remote access to your Kubernetes API without VPNs or other complicated networking? ngrok’s K8s Operator makes it secure, declarative, and RBAC-friendly.
By Joel Hans
April 17, 2025
Deploy custom error pages with your logo, your messages, your way
You can't always control when your services crash, but with Traffic Policy and custom responses, you can build consistent and helpful error pages in minutes.
By Joel Hans
April 15, 2025
All the ways to hang with an ngrokker (and see what they built) at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025
From Platform Engineering Day, to our booth at N611, to talks on Gateway API implementations and API gateway maturity, there are plenty of places to find us.
By Joel Hans
March 20, 2025
Four ways multicloud breaks you (and how API gateways help)
Multicloud isn’t magic—it’s a mess of networking, configuration, security, and observability pain. API gateways can help—here’s how to fix it the easy way.
By Joel Hans
March 11, 2025
Put your APIs online the easy and composable way
A composable API gateway means total flexibility. Learn how ngrok's endpoints and Traffic Policy make exposing, routing to, securing, and scaling APIs a cinch.
By Joel Hans
March 6, 2025
Fast and secure ingress to remote AIs with ngrok, Deepseek, and Ollama
Your simplest path to AI collaboration or development using ngrok and Deepseek with an assist from Ollama and a GPU-accelerated virtual machine.
Protect services with a circuit breaker at your API gateway
Implement circuit breaking at your API gateway to prevent cascading failures and protect services, and without having to add more complexity to your APIs.
By Joel Hans
January 6, 2025
The 3 big problems holding back API gateway observability
Deployment complexity, environment constraints, and poor debugging tools create more barriers to API gateway maturity than they do benefits.
By Joel Hans
December 18, 2024
Create a self-service app and API delivery platform with composable Traffic Policy
ngrok lets you manipulate traffic at multiple moments in the request lifecycle, allowing API developers to compose, not compromise, powerful API gateway rules.
By Joel Hans
December 10, 2024
Manage traffic on a region-aware API gateway—without the networking
Build a region-aware API gateway with ngrok's Traffic Policy. Route requests, manage failover, and enforce regional compliance with simple YAML configs.
By Joel Hans
December 4, 2024
Debug traffic flows with cloud endpoints and custom responses
By using the custom-response Traffic Policy action and a public endpoint, you can quickly develop new policy rules without standing up a whole infrastructure.
By Joel Hans
November 12, 2024
Drop-in API gateway policy examples for manipulating headers
With these ready-for-prod Traffic Policy rules, you can boost your security, give customers SLA metrics, and create geo-aware APIs in a few lines of YAML.
By Joel Hans
October 17, 2024
How nuanced rate limiting transforms your API and business
Master the dynamics of API rate limiting with ngrok’s gateway: a key to enhanced security, efficiency, and user satisfaction.
By Joel Hans
October 3, 2024
CliffsNotes your voicemails with WebSockets, Twilio, and OpenAI
Explore ngrok's WebSocket capabilities with a demo crafted for Office Hours, integrating with OpenAI’s API to create a secure phone call summarization app.
By Joel Hans
October 2, 2024
Deploy advanced HTTP traffic shaping with request variables and CEL
Explore ngrok's request variables and Common Expression Language to create flexible, powerful HTTP traffic shaping rules for your API endpoints.
By Joel Hans
September 12, 2024
Introducing Office Hours: Learn about and build on ngrok together
Join ngrok's Office Hours: A monthly livestream for developers to learn, ask questions, and explore ngrok's capabilities beyond secure tunneling.
By Joel Hans
September 11, 2024
Set up a reverse proxy with AWS and ngrok
Discover what a reverse proxy is and why they're essential for public-facing services, apps, and APIs, and learn how to set up a reverse proxy on AWS with ngrok
By Joel Hans
August 21, 2024
Easier DNS configuration with subdomains and zones—and a switch
Using branded domains with ngrok? It’s never been easier or more error-proof to establish proper DNS zones for delegation and namespacing.
By Joel Hans
August 19, 2024
Developer's guide: Manage traffic with CEL expressions and connection variables
Explore how ngrok's Traffic Policy feature helps developers filter traffic, without requiring help from ops, with raw connection variable data and CEL.
By Joel Hans
August 14, 2024
How to implement mutual TLS (mTLS) with ngrok’s API gateway
Mutual TLS (mTLS) with an API gateway can help you meet compliance requirements in industries that demand high security for data transmission.
By Joel Hans
August 13, 2024
APIOps and an API gateway: Get your development groove back
Discover how GitOps and APIOps can revolutionize your API gateway workflow, offering version control, easy deployment, and developer sanity with ngrok.
By Joel Hans
August 6, 2024
How ngrok’s GSLB elevates Linode-hosted SaaS performance and resilience
Discover how ngrok’s Global Server Load Balancing also brings multi-cloud and smoother application delivery to SaaS hosted globally on Linode VMs or k8s clusters.
By Joel Hans
July 17, 2024
API gateway gallery: Drop-in API policy management examples
With these 10 YAML-configured examples, you can mix-and-match your way to better security, availability, and observability of your freshest APIs.
By Joel Hans
May 30, 2024
Secure your API with JWTs and ngrok’s API Gateway
Secure your APIs with JWT authentication using ngrok’s developer-defined API Gateway for enhanced security and seamless integration.
By Joel Hans
May 16, 2024
Developer experience in deployed API gateways: Kong vs. ngrok
Discover the simplicity of ngrok's API gateway and compare it to Kong for enabling developer productivity, ease of use, and rapid deployment capabilities.
By Joel Hans
May 14, 2024
Build your developer-defined "golden path" with the Kubernetes Gateway API and ngrok
The Kubernetes Gateway API and ngrok’s Cloud put power back into developers’ hands while abstracting away all the complexity of secure Kubernetes networking.
By Joel Hans
April 25, 2024
AI meets privacy: ngrok's secure bridge to customer data
Explore how ngrok enhances AI development by enabling secure, direct access to customer data, ensuring data integrity and privacy.
Build an API in Next.js and deploy with Rancher
See how to build and deploy a Next.js application in Kubernetes with Rancher
By Joel Hans
November 30, 2023