ngrok Announces JavaScript and Python SDKs for Secure Connectivity

SAN FRANCISCO — DECEMBER 6, 2023 — ngrok, the secure unified ingress platform for developers, today unveiled its JavaScript and Python SDKs, enabling developers to programmatically serve their applications and manage traffic by embedding ingress with a single line of code. These new SDKs, in addition to the existing ones for Go and Rust, bring ngrok’s transformative ingress-as-a-service model to the massively popular JavaScript and Python developer ecosystems. Developers familiar with ngrok can think of these SDKs as the ngrok agent packaged up as a JavaScript and Python package.

The ngrok SDKs enable a significant paradigm shift in application delivery. Today, there is an implicit, hidden dependency between the application and the infrastructure that delivers it, such as load balancers and reverse proxies. This hidden dependency is the source of lost revenue and downtime due to misconfigurations between these components. Developers must manually configure and manage the delivery infrastructure to serve their applications. Declaring ingress, which encompasses non-functional capabilities such as high performance, resilience, security and observability needed for flawless delivery of their software, directly in the application itself, radically simplifies the development process. 

With these SDKs, developers don’t have to spend time and effort writing code to fulfill non-functional requirements. The SDKs empower developers to establish precise, API-defined contracts that dictate the expected behavior between their applications and the ingress layer. This approach ensures a secure and stable programming model, safeguarding against changes within the ingress platform that could disrupt access and traffic flow to the upstream service. Designed with idiomatic programming constructs, these SDKs can be integrated seamlessly into an application. 

ngrok SDKs also enable platform independence and portability as it decouples application ingress from the hosting environment. Applications can run seamlessly across various platforms and devices without custom configurations for each environment.  

ngrok expanded SDK support for JavaScript and Python next because of their large developer communities. JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language, and Python has quickly become the foremost choice for AI/ML applications. ngrok SDKs can be used to deliver cutting-edge applications and APIs built using these languages. 

“ngrok’s expansion into JavaScript and Python SDKs is a testament to our dedication to simplifying ingress for developers,” said Alan Shreve, founder and CEO of ngrok. “With these new SDKs, developers in these ecosystems can stop worrying about arcane networking details and focus on the core business logic for their applications, fostering faster innovation and smoother feature delivery. We are committed to building SDKs for all major programming languages.”

The ngrok SDKs offer a native, programmatic mechanism to deliver apps and APIs via ngrok’s global network. In addition to the SDKs, developers can also leverage ngrok as a stand-alone service, as an interactive CLI and as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller.

Developers use ngrok to solve the following problems: 

• Ingress to customer’s developer environments: Customers like Diagrid and Monday.com embed the ngrok SDK into their own CLI to establish secure connectivity into end user’s developer environments. The SDKs enable them to deliver frictionless developer experiences that allow their customers to more quickly prototype and develop new integrations with their platform. 

• Ingress to APIs in customer networks: ngrok SDKs can be leveraged to securely access APIs running on software in customers’ environments. There is no need to struggle with site-to-site VPNs, VPC peering, PrivateLink and firewall configurations or develop bespoke configurations for each customer that prevent rapid scaling. Enterprises like Databricks have used ngrok to accelerate customer onboarding, reducing time to value from months to days. 

• Ingress to APIs on devices running on external networks: ngrok SDKs can be integrated into the software already running on IoT devices. This standardizes network access so that enterprise cloud services can connect to APIs on those devices to manage them at scale even when they’re not part of the corporate network. Enterprises can also apply consistent security policies across their entire IoT fleet.

Visit the ngrok blog to learn more about ngrok SDKs for JavaScript and Python.