Tailscale in Practice: Multiple Tailnets, Automated Operations, and Exit Nodes

Tailscale in Practice: Multiple Tailnets, Automated Operations, and Exit Nodes

Tailscale in Practice: Multiple Tailnets, Automated Operations, and Exit Nodes

This is a practical talk for teams who've adopted Tailscale and want to take it further. It covers when to choose multiple tailnets for environment isolation, a reusable pattern for automating Tailscale operations, and design considerations for running exit nodes with auto-healing, high availability, and observability.

At Gaudiy, Tailscale is core infrastructure that is managed entirely as code via Terraform and integrated with Google Workspace for identity.

With ~200 users and 400 devices, we operate three isolated tailnets — prod (SRE), dev (all engineers), and corp (IT and SRE, shared resources including Exit Nodes). This talk covers three aspects of how we build and operate this setup: Multi-tailnet with node sharing, automated operations with GitHub Actions, and production exit nodes on Google Cloud.