I did not intuitively understand what Tailscale does, so I visited the following related page:

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

Ah! OK, now I get it! :-)

But, what found particularly interesting on that page was the following:

>" Some especially cruel networks block UDP entirely

, or are otherwise so strict that they simply cannot be traversed using STUN and ICE. For those situations, Tailscale provides a network of so-called DERP (Designated Encrypted Relay for Packets) servers. These fill the same role as TURN servers in the ICE standard, except they use HTTPS streams and WireGuard keys instead of the obsolete TURN recommendations."

DERP seems like one interesting solution (there may be others!) to UDP blockages...

i like tailscale but i notice that i get more weird network blippy latency issues when using it. i used to always have my phone connected to my tailnet so i could use my dns, etc. but always occasionally something won’t load right and i have to refresh again couple of times.

It tended to happen a lot more when switching between wifi / cellular when leaving and entering buildings, etc.

Now I just don’t use it

Very cool, I love Tailscale. I use it to connect together a VPS, desktop computer, phone, and a few laptops. My main use case is self-hosted Immich and Forgejo so this is great.

Can someone help me understand what this is vs exposing my services via MagicDNS using the tailscale Kubernetes operator? Functionally it looks like a fair amount of overlap but this solution is generic outside of Kubernetes and more baked into tailscale itself? The operator solution obviously uses kube primitives to achieve a fair amount of the features discussed here.

Does anyone use Tailscale in production as the network layer between services? Would be interested about hearing experiences.

We use it for to allow us to connect in from the outside (and user to user access etc), but not for service to service connections.

This project exactly does the same thing https://github.com/mascarenhasmelson/TailPass

Fascinating to watch Tailscale evolve from what was (at least in my mind) a consumer / home-lab / small-business client networking product into an enterprise server-networking product.

This would be great if it supported wildcards for ingress controllers. A service foo would give you foo.tailYYYY.ts.net as well as *.foo.tailYYYY.ts.net.

If I'm getting this right it's only highly available from a network layer perspective. However if one of your nodes is still responsive but the service that you exposed on it isn't responsive there's no way for Tailscale to know and it'll route the packet just the same? It's not doing health checks like a reverse proxy would I imagine.

This sounds great, I think it's exactly what I was looking for recently for hosting arbitrary services on my tailnet. I figured out a workaround where i created a wildcard certificate and dns cname record pointing to my raspberry pi on my tailnet but this could be potentially simpler