Edge & IoT fleets on one mesh

Robots, kiosks, gateways, sensors — every device dials out and lands in your private network. Nothing listens on the public internet.

A fleet that calls home, never listens

Every device initiates its own connection out to the mesh — through carrier NAT, locked-down LTE, or whatever firewall the site has. There is no inbound port to open, no public IP to rent, and no SIM-VPN contract per thousand devices.

  • ✓Works on CGNAT and private-IP cellular plans
  • ✓Same mesh whether the device is in Ohio or Osaka
  • ✓Devices appear in the console the moment they boot
fleet — device check-ins
robot-a117warehouse · LTE23 msONLINE
kiosk-0451retail · broadband41 msONLINE
gw-plant-3factory · CGNAT58 msONLINE
robot-a032depot · last seen 2d—OFFLINE

Provision at the factory, revoke in two clicks

Auth keys are baked into the device image at manufacturing, tagged for their fleet and scoped to exactly what the device needs. When a kiosk walks out the door, its key dies — the rest of the fleet never notices.

# bake this into the device image
$ openvlan up --authkey=tskey-device-xyz
 
# pre-authorized, tagged, ephemeral keys for factory provisioning
$ openvlan key create --tags=robot,fleet-a --ephemeral --reusable
 
# stolen kiosk? two clicks, one dead key, 4,999 others untouched

Why fleets move to the mesh

🤖

Outbound-only connections

Devices behind carrier NAT, CGNAT, or locked-down LTE still connect — they initiate, firewalls stay happy.

🏭

No per-site VPN

Retire the SIM-based VPN plans and per-site tunnels. One identity per device on one mesh.

🌐

Geography-agnostic

A device in a factory, a food truck, and a field trailer behave identically — the network doesn't care where they physically sit.

📶

Fails over quietly

Wifi to LTE to ethernet — the client re-establishes on whatever path appears without a provisioning change.

🏷️

Tag-based policy

ACLs match device tags: tag:robot may reach the telemetry service and nothing else.

🔄

Key rotation, handled

Keys are per-device and revocable individually. A stolen kiosk is a two-click problem.

🔒

No inbound surface

Nothing about the fleet is reachable from the internet — scanners see nothing because there is nothing to see.

🧬

Per-device identity

Every packet carries the device's identity, so telemetry, commands, and OTA updates are attributable end-to-end.

🪶

Light clients

Linux clients run on ARM boards and 20 MB of RAM. If it runs Linux, it joins.

📈

Fleet visibility

See every device, its last check-in, and its OS version from the console.

📦

Image-baked provisioning

Factory imaging includes the auth key; devices join on first boot without a human in the loop.

🛠️

Remote fixes

SSH into a gateway across the world to reconfigure it — no site visit, no jump box, fully audited.

Fleets running on OpenVLAN

Logistics robots

Warehouse fleets phone home to one telemetry endpoint — private, authenticated, revocable.

Retail kiosks & POS

Thousands of stores, zero inbound ports, centralized payment-backend access.

Industrial gateways

Modbus/PLC gateways reachable by engineers worldwide without site visits.

Edge & IoT FAQs

What hardware can run the client?
Any Linux box with ~20 MB of spare RAM — ARM boards, industrial gateways, old thin clients, routers with OpenWrt. There's also a container image for anything that runs Docker.
How do devices get online without a public IP?
They dial out. The client initiates a connection to the coordination layer and keeps it alive — carrier NAT, CGNAT, and restrictive firewalls are all fine because nothing needs to reach the device first.
Can we push firmware updates over the mesh?
Yes — OTA services are just another private endpoint on the tailnet. Devices pull updates from a server nobody else can see, and failed updates can be debugged over the same path.
What happens when a device is stolen?
Revoke its key from the console. The device loses the network within seconds; its identity is dead even if the hardware still boots. Every other device is untouched.
How is fleet pricing structured?
Per-device rates that step down with volume, with device-only nodes priced well below full user seats. The first ten devices are free for as long as you want to test.

Put your fleet on the mesh

Test with ten devices free — scale to ten thousand when ready.