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I wouldn't sell it for two reasons: 1. The market that needs this will not be capable to use it 2. The market that is capable to use it is also capable to use

I wouldn't sell it for two reasons: 1. The market that needs this will not be capable to use it 2. The market that is capable to use it is also capable to use something like Cloudflare Access. As for 'domain controller', like others have posted, that is a product or branded product from microsoft that doesn't have much to do with what you described. You could argue that Microsoft Windows Server can host most of those services, and will likely need a Microsoft Active Directory service (which in turn requires at least one Active Directory Domain Controller), it's not really related to what you are doing besides perhaps a user directory. In a way, your product would address the classic setup that Microsoft (and Apple) have thrown away (many) years ago, companies are very bad at IT, and it gets worse as you focus on smaller companies and companies where IT is rather far removed from their core business. Something that is managed and maintained by someone else, that is where the money is, and in almost all cases that means the services and applications are not co-located in some office somewhere, mostly because the office is pretty much irrelevant these days.

elevation 2y ago
> the classic setup that Microsoft (and Apple) have thrown away (many) years ago I acknowledge this trend; Microsoft wants everyone in the cloud so their on-prem offerings, while entrenched, are stagnant. This could be an opening that lets me build a quality product for a modest customer base who are unable/unwilling to migrate.
- oneplane 2y ago
  Perhaps your 'best' competition would be more like the Synology and QNAP type of deals. Anything beyond that doesn't fit in an appliance-style product. Keep in mind that those brands also have connectivity, filing, user directories, network services (DHCP, NTP, NTP, L2 and L3 VPNs), but in practise they suffer from the same things small businesses have for decades: lack of internal knowledge. And since such systems are never set-and-forget, they would either need physical maintenance contracts (which SMBs can't afford) or remote SaaS-style maintenance which somewhat defeats the point. The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days, and that's just to get things up and running. The next step up is still bigger gap than it used to be, but also quickly gets you into too-capable-to-be-a-market territory. Maybe a better model is the one attempted by the private computing brands, I don't know a successful one of the top of my head but they generally have a NUC-like device with Linux on it with hardware root-of-trust and they present it as a portable-but-desktop computer that comes with a more trustworthy OS and network security. Some are based on heads & tails, others on Qubes OS, others just a fork of PostmarketOS with some Graphene in the mix. The early ones all failed because they just weren't useful to the average user, but the later ones didn't fail immediately while they were news.
  - elevation 2y ago
    > The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days This is a major advantage of the mesh VPN layer. If your bare metal hosts/guests hardware have internet access via plain old DHCP, they can connect to the mesh network which is where all the special networking happens at the direction of the controller. On the mesh, every node can have a persistent static IP and dns entry, simplifying the network topology for the layers above.

elevation 2y ago

> the classic setup that Microsoft (and Apple) have thrown away (many) years ago I acknowledge this trend; Microsoft wants everyone in the cloud so their on-prem offerings, while entrenched, are stagnant. This could be an opening that lets me build a quality product for a modest customer base who are unable/unwilling to migrate.

oneplane 2y ago
Perhaps your 'best' competition would be more like the Synology and QNAP type of deals. Anything beyond that doesn't fit in an appliance-style product. Keep in mind that those brands also have connectivity, filing, user directories, network services (DHCP, NTP, NTP, L2 and L3 VPNs), but in practise they suffer from the same things small businesses have for decades: lack of internal knowledge. And since such systems are never set-and-forget, they would either need physical maintenance contracts (which SMBs can't afford) or remote SaaS-style maintenance which somewhat defeats the point. The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days, and that's just to get things up and running. The next step up is still bigger gap than it used to be, but also quickly gets you into too-capable-to-be-a-market territory. Maybe a better model is the one attempted by the private computing brands, I don't know a successful one of the top of my head but they generally have a NUC-like device with Linux on it with hardware root-of-trust and they present it as a portable-but-desktop computer that comes with a more trustworthy OS and network security. Some are based on heads & tails, others on Qubes OS, others just a fork of PostmarketOS with some Graphene in the mix. The early ones all failed because they just weren't useful to the average user, but the later ones didn't fail immediately while they were news.
- elevation 2y ago
  > The gap between people able to buy an appliance and people who know basic routing, DNAT and subnetting is really really big these days This is a major advantage of the mesh VPN layer. If your bare metal hosts/guests hardware have internet access via plain old DHCP, they can connect to the mesh network which is where all the special networking happens at the direction of the controller. On the mesh, every node can have a persistent static IP and dns entry, simplifying the network topology for the layers above.