January Tailscale newsletter
👉 We’d love to hear what you think about Tailscale, and filling out this Google form helps us build a better product for you!
As our plans for 2023 get well and truly underway, we want to dedicate this first newsletter of the year to you, our community. We love doing what we do, in no small part because every month we discover the new and interesting ways you find to work and play with Tailscale. Last year, we featured more than 100 community contributions in our newsletters! Your enthusiasm and resourcefulness inspire us — and we hope that by highlighting these contributions each month, we in turn help inspire you. We can’t wait to see the new and exciting ways you use Tailscale in 2023!
🚀 We’re hiring! We’re looking for driven individuals who think differently, enjoy collaborating with highly technical remote teams, and are comfortable working asynchronously. See our open roles below, and learn more about our company vision.
- Android Engineer
- Software Engineer: Data
- Technical Program Manager
- Windows Software Engineer
- Lifecycle Marketing Manager
- Product Marketing Manager
- Product Manager
- Product Manager EU
January brought some terrific community contributions and other goings-on that we want to share. Let’s jump in:
From the community
Techblitz speaks to Avery Pennarun, Tailscale co-founder and CEO [Japanese]
Speaking with Avery Pennarun, Techblitz notes that “Tailscale’s popularity in Japan is growing at a very fast pace, especially among students.”
Securely ingressing into bare metal Kubernetes clusters with Gateway API and Tailscale
Twitter user Martín Montes shares a guide on how to avoid exposing your homelab to the internet: “To be able to privately address our devices from any network, we will be introducing Tailscale, a VPN service that, unlike other centralized solutions, enables encrypted point-to-point connections between your devices by using the Wireguard protocol.”
Block ads at home and on the go with Pi-hole and Tailscale
Twitter user Laurens Groeneveld says he “set up Tailscale today after seeing @shanselman talking about it often, and I’m impressed. Was super easy to hook up my mobile devices and connect my Raspberry Pi to it. Now I have my Pi-hole everywhere, even on the go.”
Security. Cryptography. Whatever. [audio]
In their “End of Year Wrap Up” episode, David C. Adrian and Deirdre Connolly gab about Tailscale’s new tailnet lock, the Okta breach, what CISOs are for anyway, Rust in Android and Chrome, passkeys support and, of course, SBF.
Trying Tailscale
Will Larson at Lethain shares a post on trying Tailscale for the first time: “Overall, I think Tailscale is a delightful experience. It was quick to install, the UI was intuitive, the right documentation was almost always one click away. Most importantly, it was easier to get working myself than to get most corporate VPNs set up and working, while playing nicely with my existing SSO providers.”
Running Rails on Fly.io with Tailscale
Franklin Hu shares a blog post on using Rails on Fly.io with Tailscale and concludes, “I’ve been impressed with how slick both products are!”
Synology offsite backup using rsync over Tailscale
Twitter user Allison Sheridan proclaims, “I FINALLY succeeded at doing @Synology offsite backup using rsync over @Tailscale.”
From the team
Traefik now offers Tailscale as certificate resolver
Tailscalar Parker Higgins explains how Traefik Proxy now allows Tailscale to manage your certificate life cycle and automatically renew your Let’s Encrypt certificate.
Tailscale in real life
FOSDEM ‘23 (Brussels)
Juan Font Alonso and Tailscale’s Kristoffer Dalby will present “Headscale: How we are using integration testing to reimplement Tailscale.” Plus: Register and join Tailscale for happy hour and snacks on February 4!
Indent & Tailscale are hosting another event in a series focused on storytelling and unplanned maintenance (San Francisco)
Request an invite to hear tales of outages, vulnerabilities and other engineering nightmares on January 26.
CactusCon 11 (Mesa, AZ)
Tailscale is proud to sponsor lunch on Day 1 of CactusCon — a free community security conference for people who share a passion for information security. Register here to join virtually or in person.
Customer stories
Learn how Tailscale simplifies networking and brings peace of mind to teams of any size.
How Corelight severed ties with their old VPN
California-based cybersecurity company Corelight switched to Tailscale the same day a construction crew accidentally severed internet cables to the data center where their VPN was hosted. Their conclusion? “Tailscale is the cloud-powered VPN that every other VPN wished it could be.”
Tailscale learning library
We are building a learning library to help folks at any stage in their career. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered, send us a tweet @Tailscale.
Understanding software-defined networking
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a network management architecture that improves agility by abstracting a network’s operation from its physical configuration. In this article, we discuss what SDN is and the benefits it brings, along with some of its drawbacks.
What you need to know about Internet Security Protocol (IPsec)
IPsec is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure communication between endpoints. This article explains what IPsec is, how it works, and some of its limitations, and compares it with an open source alternative, WireGuard®.
That’s all for now. Stay well!
🔈P.S. Leaving a review on G2 helps more teams find Tailscale. We’d really appreciate it if you took the time to put in a good word.
