Overview

Tillered Self-Hosted, also known as Arctic, is a self-managed overlay networking product that connects distributed Linux hosts through encrypted tunnels. Unlike Tillered Cloud, you deploy and manage the full infrastructure yourself, giving you complete control over your network topology, routing rules, and data path.

Arctic runs as an agent on each participating host. You configure the cluster declaratively using YAML compose files or imperatively through the CLI, and each agent coordinates with its peers to establish encrypted tunnels, synchronize state, and enforce routing policies.

Key concepts

Arctic is built around three core building blocks:

• Peers are the individual Arctic agents that form your cluster. Each peer runs on a Linux host and maintains encrypted connections to other peers in the same cluster. See Clustering for how peers discover each other and synchronize state.
• Services define traffic policies applied to a peer. A service groups one or more routes and controls how traffic is matched and forwarded. See Service management for how to create and configure services.
• Routes are the rules within a service that match traffic by destination and direct it to a target peer. See Routing for how routes are evaluated and how traffic flows through the overlay.

Getting started

Follow these steps to go from a fresh environment to a working Arctic cluster:

1. Check prerequisites - verify system requirements, network ports, and required packages
2. Install Arctic - install the Arctic agent and CLI on your hosts
3. Run the quickstart - define a compose file and deploy your first cluster

Sections

• Getting Started - prerequisites, installation, and quickstart
• Guides - compose files, peer and service management, upgrades, and troubleshooting
• Reference - CLI commands and configuration file reference
• Concepts - clustering, routing, and transparent mode
• Glossary - definitions for key terms