Tailscale took part in this weekend’s Southern California Linux Expo, where a few lucky team members had the chance to chat with hundreds of open source developers and enthusiasts in attendance. SCaLE, which has taken place annually since 2002, is North America’s largest community-run open-source and free-software conference.
As a silver sponsor, Tailscale had a home base in the exhibition hall, alongside other groups running the gamut from tech giants like GitHub and AWS, to non-profits like EFF and the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, to community free software projects like Debian and Rocky Linux. This year our booth was next to Datadog’s, extending the streak of serendipitous juxtapositions that started last year when we were neighbors with Grafana Labs.
Over the weekend, thousands of attendees passed through the space to pick up swag and learn about what all these groups had to offer. Lots and lots of these folks had some kind of homelab set up, and many were eager to tell us about how Tailscale has simplified their remote access—or to express (usually with some embarrassment!) that they hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet, but they’re meaning to. We were there to offer high fives or absolution, respectively.
We even had a few cases of my favorite conference exchange: Somebody stops by on Day 1 and learns about Tailscale for the first time, then they set it up that evening, and they come back to our booth with the zeal of the convert on Day 2.
Since this was my second SCaLE as a Tailscalar, I could observe a few small year-over-year changes in the people we spoke with.
- More people than ever had questions about Tailscale and Kubernetes cluster connectivity. We were able to point them to our Kubernetes operator and our other k8s docs, and we mentioned that we’ll be at KubeCon EU next month.
- Similarly, lots of people wanted to talk about connecting to AI workloads. These conversations usually revolved around GPUs, but they ranged from hobbyists who wanted to access a local LLM model while on the go to employees at AI companies that span multiple cloud providers.
- We now talk to a small-but-significant number of people whose first exposure to Tailscale was at work. That’s probably inevitable as our customer count climbs, but it’s a notable shift from just a few years ago.
This year Tailscale also had a spot in the speaker track, with our own Alex Kretzschmar presenting a talk called “Access self-hosted services securely from anywhere” to a standing-room-only crowd. Video of that talk is available below:
In keeping with the inclusive and DIY spirit of SCaLE, the expo is co-located with a few other events that have their own speaker series and meet-ups. This year, that list of events included some with lots of Tailscale overlap: Cloud Native Days, DevOpsDay LA, Planet Nix, and many others.
Participating in the open-source community is an important part of Tailscale’s culture, and it reflects our commitment to trust, transparency, and empowering our users. So to close, we want to express our gratitude to the volunteer organizers of SCaLE and its co-located events for the opportunity to gather in person and share our enthusiasm together.
Parker Higgins
