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Tailscale raises $100M

(tailscale.com)
854 points gmemstr | 5 comments | 04 May 22 13:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.292s | source
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nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 14:29 UTC] No.31260955[source]▶
Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work.

The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure. Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core… I’m sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best.

I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

Web3 happens when people can host stuff on their phones, and Tailscale is something that lets you host things on your phone.

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1. polote ◴[04 May 22 20:15 UTC] No.31265274[source]▶
> The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure.

The same thing is being said on HN about all kind of network software, but tell me one software that Cloudflare is really known for except its cdn ? None.

HN is really a strong echo chamber and some people believe Cloudflare and Stripe are going to be the leader in all software areas. (Even though Cloudflare is not the leading CDN and Stripe is not the leading payment processor). They are both amazing companies but they won't fix all problems of the world. I would even argue that they won't even solve more than their current core domains

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2. freedomben ◴[04 May 22 20:22 UTC] No.31265346[source]▶
We must be in different circles, because WAF (web application firewall) is what I would say they're most known for. But I agree Cloudflare isn't well known (at least yet) fort many of the other things they offer. Been a lot of buzz around workers but I haven't tried it myself yet.
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3. nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 21:11 UTC] No.31265897[source]▶
I bring up cloudflare because the technologies involved with Tailscale are really cloudflare core competencies. Cloudflare runs 1.1.1.1/WARP which is a massive dns server and wireguard VPN, respectively. They already have Cloudflare Access. It’s a natural fit. It’s pretty easy to imagine that cloudflare is better positioned to steal customers from Tailscale than Cisco, F5, or Fortinet.

Cloudflare needs to solve two problems: they need to introduce a free tier of Access that doesn’t use the CDN and creates direct connections between endpoints (to basically remove all operating costs), and they need to make the onboarding process for hobbyists easier instead of having a “contact sales” link on their homepage for these products. That’s doable.

4. devman0 ◴[04 May 22 22:11 UTC] No.31266523[source]▶
CDN and Reverse Proxy are Cloudflare's bread and butter really, WAF came later. The issue is that those technologies are rather invisible to most users when they are working correctly.
5. SergeAx ◴[05 May 22 10:46 UTC] No.31271702[source]▶
CloudFlare has a world best DNS system, and if you are still using another DNS provider - I wholeheartedly recommend to switch ASAP.