Blog

Engineering notes from the Zentinel project

Sentinel Is Now Zentinel

We've rebranded from Sentinel to Zentinel and moved to a new home at zentinelproxy.io. Here's what changed, what didn't, and what you need to do.

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Introducing the Zentinel Control Plane: Fleet Management Built on Elixir

The Zentinel Control Plane is a fleet management system for Zentinel reverse proxies — built with Elixir/Phoenix and LiveView. It handles configuration distribution, deployment orchestration, and real-time node monitoring. Here's what we built, why we chose Elixir, and how the internals work.

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Zentinel Upgrades to Pingora 0.7: Dropping the Fork, Gaining New Capabilities

Cloudflare's Pingora 0.7 ships connection-level filtering, extensible TLS context, and the security fixes we were carrying in a fork. Zentinel now runs on upstream Pingora with zero patches — here's what changed and what it unlocks.

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Zentinel 26.02: Every Binary Signed, Every Dependency Listed

Release 26.02 adds supply chain security to every Zentinel release — cosign signatures, SLSA provenance, and SBOMs in CycloneDX and SPDX formats. Here's what we built, why it matters, and how to verify your deployment in 30 seconds.

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Benchmarking Zentinel Against the Established Proxies

We put Zentinel head-to-head with Envoy, HAProxy, nginx, and Caddy — then used the results to find and fix the per-request allocations that were costing us CPU. Three rounds of optimization later, Zentinel matches or beats every proxy we tested on tail latency.

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