At first, rolling your own VPN setup seems like the right call.
You get full control. No third-party dependencies. Your infrastructure, your rules. It feels like the secure, responsible thing to do — especially for teams that value ownership and deeply understand their stack.
But then reality creeps in.
What starts as a side project — maybe just a cloud VM running OpenVPN — eventually snowballs into a full-time maintenance burden. Updates become nagging to-dos. Scaling turns messy. VPN outages show up in your incident logs. And all of a sudden, your dev team is juggling certificate rotations instead of product features.
Let’s break down the real-world risks of maintaining VPN infrastructure in-house, from the eyes of those who build and maintain it — developers, SREs, and platform engineers.
What’s Actually Inside VPN Infrastructure? (source link)
When people say "we host our own VPN," the full stack involved usually gets overlooked.
Here’s what’s actually under the hood:
VPN servers (often regionally deployed for latency)
Authentication systems (OAuth, LDAP, SAML, etc.)
Encryption protocols (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN, etc.)
Key/cert management (rotation, storage, expiration handling)
Monitoring and logging (for both performance and security)
Client apps or configs (across desktop and mobile platforms)
It’s not just a Linux box with openvpn.conf. It’s an ecosystem. And each part requires attention, updates, and testing. Miss one detail, and you’ve got either a security hole or a usability nightmare.
VPNs in Practice: What You’re Really Maintaining
Let’s quickly walk through what actually happens when a team member connects to your VPN:
They launch a VPN client or initiate a connection manually.
Their device authenticates with a server (credentials, tokens, certs).
An encrypted tunnel is established.
All traffic routes through this tunnel.
The VPN server decrypts it, forwards it to internal services.
The response makes the return trip through the same tunnel.
This process is fragile. Any misstep — expired certs, dropped packets, DNS hiccups — and the user loses access. So maintaining VPN infrastructure isn’t just “set it and forget it.” It’s more like keeping a plane in the air with duct tape and hope — unless you’ve built it for resilience from day one (and most haven’t).
The Real Risks of Going DIY
Here’s where the rubber meets the road.
- Security Drift
Even if your setup starts secure, it won’t stay that way unless you actively maintain it.
TLS versions get deprecated.
Old protocols linger for compatibility (and become attack vectors).
Certificate rotation gets skipped "just this once."
Auth systems lack MFA or get patched inconsistently.
Security issues in VPN setups are especially dangerous because your VPN sits at the edge of your infrastructure. Once breached, it’s a gateway to everything.
- Unseen Operational Load
VPNs aren’t feature work, but they eat sprint cycles anyway.
Region goes down? You’re paged.
Certs expire? You’re on it.
New hire can’t connect from their MacBook in Malaysia? Guess who’s debugging network logs at 9 a.m.?
Even if it’s not a daily issue, VPN maintenance becomes a recurring tax. It drags down productivity, drains morale, and becomes tribal knowledge that only two engineers understand.
- Scaling Is Not Linear
The more users and regions you add, the worse this gets.
More users = more load on existing nodes
More regions = more routing logic and latency tuning
More devices = more edge cases (Android VPN quirks, anyone?)
Most dev-built VPN setups aren’t built for global teams. They’re optimized for “our team of 12 in one time zone.” Anything beyond that and you’re in patch-and-pray territory.
- Redundancy Isn’t Plug and Play
Building HA (high availability) VPN infrastructure isn’t trivial:
You need failover logic that preserves active sessions.
You need heartbeat checks to detect and reroute around outages.
You need multiple nodes per region to handle peak load.
Plenty of teams say “we’ve got two VPN servers, so we’re good.” Until one fails and the other one melts down under doubled traffic.
True redundancy takes effort — and testing — that most teams don’t prioritize until something breaks.
- Device and Network Diversity
Modern remote work spans:
Windows, macOS, Linux
Android, iOS
Home WiFi, 5G, café networks, tethered hotspots
Each combination can break differently. Android, for example, limits background execution of VPN apps. iOS handles VPN dropouts differently depending on how the tunnel is configured.
When your in-house VPN doesn’t "just work," you become tech support for every user’s device quirks.
- Logging and Compliance Headaches
Even if you're not in a regulated industry, you’ll eventually need:
Centralized audit logs
Per-user access history
Alerts on suspicious behavior
Location-aware access controls
Piecing this together from scattered log files across EC2 boxes and VPN daemons is not only painful — it's error-prone.
One misconfigured rule or missing log rotation job, and you’ve got a gap you can’t account for. That’s how incidents slip through the cracks.
- It Steals Time From Product Work
You didn’t hire engineers to babysit VPN tunnels. Yet that’s where they often end up.
Troubleshooting DNS inside the tunnel
Dealing with weird MTU issues
Debugging split tunnel vs full tunnel behavior
Supporting mobile clients that never quite behave the same
Each of these issues is small. But they’re persistent. They pull attention from the roadmap, and they kill momentum. Over time, it becomes infrastructure debt.
Why Teams Still Do It Anyway
Despite all this, teams still build their own VPNs. Why?
Cost: Self-hosted seems cheaper at first (spoiler: it isn’t).
Control: Total ownership feels safer (until it breaks).
Simplicity: “It’s just for a few engineers” (until it isn’t).
Avoiding lock-in: Nobody wants to depend on a vendor for core security (understandably).
These are valid concerns. But most of them fade as soon as you hit scale.
When VPNs Become a Liability
You know it’s time to rethink your setup when:
Security patches fall behind
Downtime becomes common
Nobody wants to touch the config files
New hires can’t onboard without Slack messages to “whoever knows the VPN stuff”
Your team spends more time fixing it than using it
At that point, it’s no longer infrastructure — it’s friction.
Final Thoughts: Build Carefully or Rethink Early
There’s no shame in building your own VPN setup. Many teams do. Some even do it well.
But if you’re going to run one in-house:
Treat it like a product, not a hobby.
Budget real engineering time for updates, scaling, and support.
Build redundancy and monitoring from day one.
Know when it’s time to move on.
Because the longer you treat VPN infrastructure as “just a small internal tool,” the more it turns into a silent bottleneck.
And no team wants to be known for the VPN that took down production.
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