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Tailscale raises $100M

(tailscale.com)
854 points gmemstr | 2 comments | 04 May 22 13:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.551s | source
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newhouseb ◴[04 May 22 13:41 UTC] No.31260241[source]▶
Tailscale is my favorite (product) discovery of 2022. I initially set it up to use as a VPN to get around a misbehaving corporate firewall and accidentally realized it solved a whole bunch of other problems I didn't realize I had. Usually a new product doesn't even live up to the intended use case and so TS is really anomalous IMHO in how good it is.

- SSH'ing into a raspberry pi I have at home that does random IoT stuff.

- Accessing servers on my local dev machine from other devices for testing (i.e. a Windows box or phone)

- Giving access to production bastion devices without publicly exposing anything to the internet.

And best of all I don't have to fiddle with the usual networking stuff. It just works. Kudos on the raise!

Non-disclaimer: I have no relation to anyone on the team. Tailscale is just a delight to use.

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1. fullstackchris ◴[04 May 22 19:38 UTC] No.31264845[source]▶
But HOW can this work? It MUST have config level access to each machine, that's the only way I can see this working. I guess I just have to try it to see.
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2. ramary ◴[04 May 22 21:00 UTC] No.31265799[source]▶
It's a really neat piece of software - you're right that it does have the ability to configure your system, routing tables in particular.

The Tailscale agent (thing that runs on your machine) changes the system routing table (at least on Linux) and uses policy-based routing (marks packets destined for the "Tailnet" specially) to build the overlay network. Since everything is done at L3 in the OSI model, iOS and Android clients (in the form of an app) are also available without needing root (jailbreaking).

There are some things it can't do owing to the whole thing operating at L3, but it's a really awesome implementation nevertheless. And just to add, they aren't the first to build a product like this, but they do it incredibly well and the time to value for most users is extremely short, made even better by the fact that the expectation is that the time to value will be long(ish) and painful.