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.
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.