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Tailscale raises $100M

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#331

Post by ignoramous »

> We've raised $100M in a Series B financing led by CRV and Insight Partners

I see they are staying away from a16z ;)

> We don't want to put revenue ahead of quality, because our stats say quality is where all our growth comes from.

Dr. Deming shining through here [0], but really, even this 1986 article paints a neat little picture of how I presume tailscale's operating at the moment: https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game

> How, Avery, on earth, are you all planning to spend one hundred million dollars?

Wireguard platinum sponsorship in 3, 2, 1...?

> Now I just tell people: We're here to fix the Internet. If we don't, who will?

I called this a year ago, as it was pretty evident to me even then (downvotes notwithstanding), but I'd not be surprised if tailscale became a ISP someday, given their holistic approach to product development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26249199 But hey, there are many more people working to fix the internet... including tailscale clones and other over-funded/under-funded developers, which brings me to...

> I mean, imagine. What if the Internet just worked like it was supposed to? [and goes on to list e2ee + Mobile IP + SSO + DDNS + NAT Traversal]

If you squint just enough, it reads like the MASQUE protocol (built atop QUIC) that Google, Apple, Cloudflare are working to standardize: https://ietf-wg-masque.github.io/

That said, in time, I see tailscale not only compete with Zscaler, but also with Tanium, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, F5, Palo Alto Networks and the likes. Once they are embed in an enterprise' network, there's very little their product couldn't expand into to make other SaaS / solutions obsolete.

[0] Systems thinking and Deming, https://archive.is/tXJhw

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#332

Post by rhuber »

lupire wrote: post #304
rhuber wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I am sure the key distribution is fast and all that, but not needing peer key distribution at all was a goal and the overhead associated is less scalable than just not doing it at all. Regardless, very cool that you can handle that many nodes, which is a hard problem. I assume you do just-in-time key distribution or something, because (n-1) distribution of peer keys would be ... less than ideal. Anywho,…

> the overhead associated is less scalable than just not doing it at all That's only true if you can actually articulate a reason why it won't scale to some matbitut that some user might actually need today or at some point in the future. For example, Go may be "not as scalable at C" (or vice versa! Or both!), but what matters is the scale to which it is actually desired to be deployed.

I mean... the title of the Tailscale blog post is "Tailscale raises $100M… to fix the Internet", and that's pretty massive scale. /s

I don't have 100k hosts on a large network to test deploying Tailscale, but if I did, I'd be benchmarking the cpu/network/storage overhead of telling 99,999 hosts about a new one that comes online, every time that happens, or every time its pubkey changes. You can optimize this away _if_ your "fan out" is not as large, but there are plenty of cases where every host on your network needs to talk to a particular host, so all of them need to know about its keys as soon as possible.

Again these aren't unsolvable problems, to a point, but we didn't want to solve a problem when we could avoid it entirely, so that's the path we chose. It removes complexity and is a good part of the reason the system we built has been resilient.

A complaint some people express about tailscale is the battery life on mobile (or at least iOS). This exists because there is coordination overhead on even idle tailscale nodes. Back when we ported Nebula to iOS, we sweated details like "how often it wakes the radios" and did a lot of profiling. I never turn Nebula "off" on my iPhone, and it just sits in there in the background not using any resources most of the time.

We worked hard to optimize this out of our architecture, so that Nebula avoids generating traffic that is unrelated to the actual communication between hosts or lookups to lighthouses. An idle nebula tunnel can truly be idle indefinitely, and that also matters as the set of hosts becomes larger.

I do not think the Nebula project and Tailscale are direct replacements for each other in any fashion, and afaik neither is trying to be. I'm just pointing out that different design goals led to unique advantages and disadvantages to each architecture.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#333

Post by naikrovek »

ncmncm wrote: post #237
skoskie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything in there TOS that states it or has this just been their practice so far?

Does it matter? Whether they say they will do it, or just do it without saying they will, the experience is the same. What matters most is if they can. Then, if they ever have done. What I want is that they can't.

you want a free service written, maintained, and hosted by others that they don't control. Am I understanding you?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#334

Post by criddell »

stanmancan wrote: post #158
siavosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

You can access your home network and any machines on it without exposing anything to the public internet. It's much safer to connect to my home network over a VPN than to expose all of the services to the public internet and hope they're all secure.

Doesn’t putting Tailscale in the middle mean you are now hoping they are secure? I supposed that’s probably better than connecting to the VPN on your home gateway router that your ISP has access to.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#335

Post by ignoramous »

Lightbody wrote: post #17

We love Tailscale. Everyone employee has it, and we use it to provide access to dev, staging, and prod environments as well. Fun little thing we did with it: nobody can access the prod network without requesting access via a Slack bot (powered by https://indent.com/ ). So somebody requests access, another authorized person approves it, and the Tailscale ACLs are updated for X minutes and then reset. Access to secure…

Well, we run our servers without ssh access... no amount escalation through ACLs / Security Groups let you in. Can't say it would work for everyone, but at least, no one can mutate prod unless the code itself exposes those interfaces.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#336

Post by airstrike »

oicU00 wrote: post #94
pilif wrote: post #9

With such a huge investment comes the obligation to eventually pay it back. Is this another one of my favourite tools going the way of Dropbox, 1Password and all other companies that were formed around what should be a platform feature, which took on way too large investment sums and were eventually forced to become the everything, losing sight of their core values? I sincerely hope not, but there's so much bad prece…

It’s a basic web UX over a built in Linux kernel feature There are Docker containerized apps that manage Wireguard too Maybe contribute to one and fret less about behavior of VC funded business and wondering if they’re actually respecting your privacy to accomplish finance goals

"It's just FTP with curlftpfs and SVN"

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#337

Post by chipsa »

windexh8er wrote: post #256
ThePhysicist wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Tailscale will focus on the consumer market, I'd be very surprised at least if they did. I think they built a developer-friendly product to get mindshare and early adoptors, but eventually the real market for such such products is in the B2B space, i.e. implementing the "BeyondCorp" model of zero-trust networking. There's also a market for building cloud mesh services but I'm not sure if Tailscale is we…

They already (sort of) do [0] as they have a "Personal Pro" plan that's not too obvious - personally, I hope they expand to make it more cloud-native via a la carte pricing for those users as I'd pay an extra $x/month for an additional subnet router or three. And, IMO, it's a smart approach - those who are the targeted "Prosumer" might leverage this for their homelab and carry it over with them into the enterprise. I…

I think they've said they don't actually enforce the usage limits, so you can add an additional subnet router and they largely don't care (because they haven't put the engineering into enforcing the limits, because it doesn't actually use up appreciably more resources for them when you exceed those limits). I think they do enforce the user limits though.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#338

Post by ncmncm »

naikrovek wrote: post #333
ncmncm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Whether they say they will do it, or just do it without saying they will, the experience is the same. What matters most is if they can. Then, if they ever have done. What I want is that they can't.

you want a free service written, maintained, and hosted by others that they don't control . Am I understanding you?

No. I would be happy to pay for service, but they offer no choice but to rely on somebody else's authentication, regardless.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#339

Post by antihero »

gzer0 wrote: post #137
siavosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network. This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

Ah, the exit node thing is really cool, always handy to have a residential IP to route through too :)

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#340

Post by api »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #317
FL410 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what you found complex - was it the PKI? I was able to get Nebula up and running WAY faster than any of the others. It's two (well really only one) binaries and a config file - the simplicity is awesome.

I found it too complex for a lay person . On a regular computer or server its not too bad. I can send someone a config file with the certs and keys already built in. That's easy enough. But on mobile it requires a back and forth exchange of keys over a different medium. Compare that to ZeroTier where I can just tell someone, "install this app and punch in this Network ID". Also, ZT lets me control the entire network…

> Their self-hosted option is a joke. There is no webui.

There's a community developed one:

https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

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