Initial Roadmap

Introduction

With any service, there’s always a question of “What’s next?” This is my way of specifying what I see on the horizon and some of the thought process behind it. This will be getting into the more technical side of things, more than I expect everyone to fully understand, but if you know what you need, it’ll help you see whether or not it’s on this list.

Immediate Future

• Bug fixes are the number one concern for after launch, making sure that everything is functional as expected right now.
• Enabling UDP tunnels will enable most other applications to work via our service.

Longer Term Plans

• A “Layer 7” HTTP service that handles all of the TLS/SSL setup needed in order to securely run a website. If you run your own server which accepts logins, you really should be using some form of encryption. You do not want your username and password sent unencrypted across the internet. Plus, it’ll get rid of the red “insecure” warnings :)
• Accessibility. Once we have a capable service that can handle the best cases, we want to enable anyone to be able to use it. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing a solution exists for your problem, and not being able to use it for a dumb reason. So we want to make that as infrequent of an experience as possible for things we can control.
• Built-in DNS management will allow people to have a static name pointing to their resources, as well as supporting certain applications that can get more contextual information from DNS records, such as which port Minecraft is pointing to. This, paired with the above HTTP service, can entirely remove the need to worry about too many people on the service asking for the same ports.
• IPv6 support will be critical for having a “forever free” tier in the future, because IPv4 addresses are limited. Because we’re not selling your data or doing anything else to exploit the free users, we have to keep the costs down some, and this is something that won’t be an interruption to almost all workloads nowadays.