Introduction

What are agents?

Agent is a lightweight daemon (bdy) installed on the server or endpoint device. It maintains a constant, encrypted outbound connection to the Buddy platform, without requiring any firewall ports to be opened.

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What are tunnels?

Tunnel is a logical communication channel that maps an external FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) to an internal IP address and device port. There are two types of tunnels:

• Ephemeral Tunnel: temporary tunnel, active until the end of the session.
• Persistent Tunnel: maintains a persistent, automatically renewed connection.

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Tunnels provide end-to-end encryption, IP masking and port forwarding.

How do agents and tunnels cooperate?

1. BDY CLI Installation - install the bdy CLI on your computer.
2. Agent Installation - copy the command from Buddy dashboard and run the bdy daemon on your server or endpoint environment.
3. Registering agent - agent establishes secure connection with Buddy controller.
4. Tunnel configuration - you define the FQDN and map it to the internal IP address and port, either in the panel or via the CLI. For advanced configuration, you can use YAML configuration to define tunnels programmatically.
5. Redirecting traffic - all HTTPS, TLS, or TCP traffic is transmitted through the Tunnel to the Agent, which forwards it to the local service.

Example use cases

• Remote Raspberry Pi management: access the GUI on port 5000 via pi.mydomain.com.
• Database access: secure connection to MongoDB instances in a private network.
• Secure API: publishing microservices without public IP
• Sharing test environment to customers before the final release.