VPN
A VPN is a system that establishes a private network across a public network, such as the Internet
Use in Dev Server
OSE launched a single staging/dev server in Hetzner Cloud in 2019. For security reasons it's imperative that this server is locked-down and sitting *behind* a VPN.
Looking Forward
Ideally, OSE would have a single rack of colocated hardware at a datacenter near FeF. As campuses pop-up, we could provision new racks at new datacenters that peer with each-other over time, if needed.
The reality is that we have a dedicated server in Falkenstein, Germany[1]; a cloud instance at a different DC in Falkenstein; a physical office in Missouri, USA that will likely have servers in the future[2]; and developers all over the world -- which begs the question: how do you architect a VPN with this hodge-podge of geographically dispersed servers & clients?
Certainly a hub-and-spoke [3] openvpn model is possible, but that introduces a single-point-of-failure.
A better option would be a decentralized mesh-style VPN solution, such as ZeroTier.