Networking on Northflank

Northflank allows flexible and secure private and public networking for services, jobs, databases and other addons. HTTP, HTTP/2, Websockets, gRPC, TCP and UDP are all supported networking protocols.

Networking settings are accessed on the ports & DNS page on deployment and combined services, and on the settings page in the network section for databases and other addons.

HTTP, HTTP/2, Websockets and gRPC can be exposed publicly via a load-balancer served with an auto-generated TLS certificate with either code.run endpoints or your own custom domains. HTTPS requests are terminated at the edge load-balancer and the request is routed via Northflank’s network.

You can choose to publicly expose databases and other addons via a load-balanced TCP endpoint. Northflank will enforce and generate TLS certificates which will be automatically configured in the database and connection details.

Northflank will expose your HTTP ports publicly on ports 80 and 443 and route traffic to your configured ports. HTTP (port 80) traffic is automatically redirected to HTTPS (port 443).

Ports serving all protocols can be configured for private networking. Services, jobs and databases with private ports will only be accessible by other resources inside the same project.

Deployments and databases can be forwarded for secure, local access, without the need to publicly expose them to the internet.

You can also enable multi-project networking to securely access resources from another Northflank project.

Northflank uses scalable and highly performant load balancers to securely distribute external traffic to containers in your projects. Traffic is routed to your application containers at the specified port configured. Every public port is assigned a Northflank code.run domain, optionally you can add custom domains, disable code.run traffic, and add IP policies and basic authentication security.

If you have multiple instances of a service running, ingress traffic will be directed with a round-robin load-balancing strategy. The load balancer will not route traffic to non-ready containers, for example containers that are starting, terminating, or that are failing health checks.

Northflank uses Let's Encrypt to provision TLS certificates on-demand, generated by Let's Encrypt. Certificates are created automatically and renewed before they expire, with 2048-bit RSA encryption.

Your custom domains can be linked to a service port and immediately start serving secure traffic with a managed Let's Encrypt certificate.

Let's Encrypt imposes rate limits . Please keep these limits in mind when adding or removing subdomains, and generating Let's Encrypt certificates via other channels.

You can reduce the number of certificates you need to generate by configuring a domain to use wildcard certificates. Wildcard certificates allow your subdomains to share a certificate, and are ideal for dynamically generating subdomains in Northflank templates and preview environments.

You can access the source IP of a request from the X-Forwarded-For header , which is attached to all HTTP/S requests by the Northflank load balancer.