Tailscale Everything

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

Bret is joined by Alex Kretzschmar to talk about Tailscale, a universal VPN that connects teams, devices, and development environments for easy access to remote resources.

Alex and I talk about projects he's worked on in containers over the years and then we quickly get into Tailscale and talking about why he joined the team there.

Tailscale is one of those tools that's hard to put down. I've used it for years to connect my personal devices to my home server lab when I'm traveling or servers I might have on the internet that I run temporarily. It connects them all together in a seamless VPN. The product itself comes up a lot in our Discord server when people are talking about needing some secure remote access to something anywhere in the world.

Tailscale keeps adding more and more features, I can't really keep up, so we had Alex on the show to talk about all the new stuff, including a client for Apple TV, which at first, I didn't quite understand why, but now it totally makes sense; and a Kubernetes operator that does some slick things around connecting engineers on their local machines to clusters. I found Alex at the Tailscale booth at KubeCon this year and invited him on the show to talk about this relatively new yet ubiquitous-feeling product.

The live recording of the complete show from November 30, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #243)

★Topics★
Tailscale website
Headscale website
Tailscale Community
Tailscale Docker Mod Blog Post
ID Headers Demo
Devrel Demo

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Alex Kretzschmar - Guest

• (00:00) - Tailscale Everything
• (19:37) - Tailscale Licensing
• (28:24) - Tailscale vs Other Networking Products
• (32:33) - Server and Key Exchange
• (33:50) - Does Tailscale Support 'Trunking'?
• (39:20) - Client for Mikrotik
• (40:06) - Docker Integration
• (43:46) - Tailscale Server on Your Own Hardware
• (46:57) - Apple TV Client
• (48:54) - Performance Breakthroughs
• (50:52) - Key Exchange Mechanism

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