Limitations for the Tailscale Kubernetes Operator

Last validated: Jun 5, 2026

The Tailscale Kubernetes Operator has the following known limitations.

General

The operator is not officially supported on platforms that restrict privileged pods, such as GKE Autopilot. Features are limited on these platforms.

The following limitations apply to egress proxies that connect cluster workloads to tailnet devices:

Egress does not support IP ranges in the tailscale.com/tailnet-ip annotation. You can specify only a single IPv4 or IPv6 address as a route.
The egress proxy cannot reach 4via6 IP addresses.
Refer to IPv6 support for IPv6-specific egress limitations.

The following limitations apply to ingress backed by a Kubernetes Ingress resource:

The only supported ingress path type is Prefix. The operator routes requests for paths with other path types according to prefix rules.
Ingress resources only support TLS, and are only exposed over HTTPS using a MagicDNS name and publicly trusted certificates from Let's Encrypt. You must enable HTTPS and MagicDNS on your tailnet.
The operator provisions certificates on the first connection, so that connection can be slow or time out while provisioning runs.

The following limitations apply to L3 ingress backed by a Kubernetes Service resource:

You cannot add the tailscale.com/proxy-group annotation to an existing standalone L3 ingress Service. Create a new Service with the annotation set to the name of the desired ProxyGroup instead.
Hostname changes using the tailscale.com/hostname annotation are not reliably applied to an already-exposed Service without recreating it.