The VPN broke at midnight. Production was fine, but no one could reach the admin panel. The tunnel that held the world together had silently collapsed.
AWS Client VPN is built to solve one problem: connecting private networks. But it’s not built for speed, simplicity, or developer happiness. You need an AWS Access VPN alternative that works without long provisioning times, clunky clients, fragile certificates, and constant maintenance.
Most teams keep VPNs because they think every secure path must go through one. AWS Access VPN is secure, but the trade-offs are real. It’s slow to set up. Changes require IAM dance steps nobody enjoys. Scaling it means more configuration files, more complexity, and more downtime risk. And when it breaks, you’re guessing through logs instead of shipping features.
Modern environments are more dynamic. Containers launch in seconds. Sandboxes expire in minutes. Dev and staging aren’t fixed networks anymore. A static VPN is the wrong shape for a moving target. You need instant access control that moves as fast as your infrastructure.