Agree with this Adam.
Avery and the team at Tailscale are building a fantastic product and totally deserve the round and recognition, huge congratulations - we're super happy for them.
In many ways they're also an ice-breaker for the zero trust overlay network architecture, which means they've got the most work to do. As the current top comment on this thread correctly notes, with huge investment comes the obligation to eventually pay it back.
The market hasn't even come close yet to crossing the chasm and seeped into mainstream conscience to become the accepted norm - yet.
That said, we believe fiercely that networks should be simple to reason about, easy to use and safe to operate. That private connectivity should “just work”, and just work in exactly the same way, everywhere too. Flexible to change, simple to automate and only available to the right things at the right times.
When you think about it, building private networks is actually pretty complex right now and can be pretty insecure too. It's some unholy combination of spell casting meets a yak shaving contest to wrangle firewalls, VPNs, MTUs, and manage IPs, subnets, ACLs, NSGs, VPCs, NAT, routing, VLANs, certificates & secret keys, then hoping a zero-day doesn't show up that drops someone straight into the network via the VPN server, who then starts poking around the squishy centre.
Once you've used products like Enclave, Tailscale or ZeroTier and seen how simple private networks really can be - at a certain point you almost stop and ask the question, why would you not do it like this.
There will always be nay-sayers and people for whom this approach just isn't a fit, and that's fine - but I personally find it hard to imagine that this genie can be put back in the bottle.
- Founder @ https://enclave.io