Tailscale Everything

Tailscale Everything

Author: Bret Fisher January 5, 2024 Duration: 55:06

Bret is joined by Alex Kretzschmar to talk about Tailscale, a universal VPN that connects teams, devices, and development environments for easy access to remote resources.

😇 My new GitHub Security workshop has launched! A free 2-hour workshop with hands-on labs to harden your repos and your workflows from common supply chain attacks. I'll cover how attackers are getting in, and then we'll lock down a sample repo so you know what needs to be done to protect your code. You'll leave with a deep understanding of risks and mitigations as well as a list of helpful tools to keep your repos safe, including my new "gasa" tool for scanning your repos and orgs.

Alex and I talk about projects he's worked on in containers over the years and then we quickly get into Tailscale and talking about why he joined the team there.

Tailscale is one of those tools that's hard to put down. I've used it for years to connect my personal devices to my home server lab when I'm traveling or servers I might have on the internet that I run temporarily. It connects them all together in a seamless VPN. The product itself comes up a lot in our Discord server when people are talking about needing some secure remote access to something anywhere in the world.

Tailscale keeps adding more and more features, I can't really keep up, so we had Alex on the show to talk about all the new stuff, including a client for Apple TV, which at first, I didn't quite understand why, but now it totally makes sense; and a Kubernetes operator that does some slick things around connecting engineers on their local machines to clusters. I found Alex at the Tailscale booth at KubeCon this year and invited him on the show to talk about this relatively new yet ubiquitous-feeling product. 

The live recording of the complete show from November 30, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #243)

★Topics★
Tailscale website
Headscale website
Tailscale Community
Tailscale Docker Mod Blog Post
ID Headers Demo
Devrel Demo

Creators & Guests

  • (00:00) - Tailscale Everything
  • (19:37) - Tailscale Licensing
  • (28:24) - Tailscale vs Other Networking Products
  • (32:33) - Server and Key Exchange
  • (33:50) - Does Tailscale Support 'Trunking'?
  • (39:20) - Client for Mikrotik
  • (40:06) - Docker Integration
  • (43:46) - Tailscale Server on Your Own Hardware
  • (46:57) - Apple TV Client
  • (48:54) - Performance Breakthroughs
  • (50:52) - Key Exchange Mechanism

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my monthly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my GitHub, Agents, Docker, and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com

★ Support this podcast ★

Bret Fisher hosts DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling alongside Nirmal Mehta, pulling conversations directly from their live audience sessions. This isn't a theoretical lecture series; it's grounded in the practical, often messy realities of building and running modern systems. Each episode digs into the specific tools and philosophies shaping infrastructure today, from the foundational elements like Docker and container orchestration with Kubernetes or Swarm to the broader cultural shifts of DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. You'll hear discussions that span the entire software lifecycle, touching on the integration of security with DevSecOps, the automation promises of GitOps, and what "Cloud Native" truly means for development teams. The dialogue stays focused on actionable insights and real-world use cases, offering a genuine sense of what works and what doesn't in the field. For anyone navigating the container and cloud ecosystem, this podcast serves as a regular, insightful check-in with practitioners and experts, hosted by someone deeply embedded in the community. The natural, interview-driven format makes complex topics accessible, ensuring listeners come away with more than just buzzwords-they get context and clarity.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling
Podcast Episodes
A single API for multicloud with Control Plane [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:26
Control Plane CEO Doron Grinstein joins me to discuss how they’ve created an AI-native cloud API that virtualizes multi-cloud and hybrid cloud to simplify management and ship faster.Watch the video of this episode. 🖥️ Wa…
CI/CD via agent tools: Skills, CLIs, MCP, and more with Semaphore [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:17:24
What does an AI-native CI look like? The Semaphore team joins me to talk about their focus on making your agent harness the gateway to testing, fixing, and deploying your code.Video podcast version here: https://youtu.be…
K8s Maxxing with AI-Native Platform Engineering Stack with OpenChoreo [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:59
OpenChoreo is a “batteries included”, AI-native Kubernetes platform stack for Platform Engineers that combines GitOps, Observability, AI Agents, and Workflows into a custom K8s distribution “super pack” that is managed v…
Docker AI, what’s new with MCP, Agents, Sandboxes, and more [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:16:20
Michael Irwin of Docker joins me to run through Gordon AI improvements, Docker Hardened Images and what's now free, Docker Sandboxes for running agents in proper isolation, Model Runner updates including MLX support on M…
Backup S3, Google Drive, iCloud, Notion with Plakar [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:53
Bret is joined by the founders of Plakar - Julien Mangeard and Gilles Chehade - to nerd out over backup engineering. The kind where you're building your own file formats and cryptographic layers, not just wiring up cron…
Your Images are Out of Date (probably) - The Silent Rebuilds problem [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:41
Container base images (like Official Docker Hub images) are often updated without new tag versions. I call this Silent Rebuilds. There's no way to know this happens without image digest-checking automation like Dependabo…
AI Wins and Misses for 2025 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:14:56
I'm joined by Nirmal Mehta of AWS and Viktor Farcic from Upbound, to go through our 2025 year in review. We look into the AI tools that consumed us this year, from CLI agents to terminal emulators, IDEs, AI browsers - wh…
Find Your K8s Happy Path with RawKode Academy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:12
I talk with David Flanagan, aka Rawkode, about his new opinionated Tech Matrix that helps you navigate the overwhelming CNCF landscape. https://rawkode.academy/technology/matrix😇 My new GitHub Security workshop has launc…
Move K8s Stateful Pods Between Nodes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:42
Bret is joined by Philip Andrews and Dan Muret of Cast AI to discuss pod live migration between nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. 😇 My new GitHub Security workshop has launched! A free 2-hour workshop with hands-on labs to…
Swarm 2030. Let's Go! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:47
Bret discusses exciting news about Swarm being maintained until 2030.😇 My new GitHub Security workshop has launched! A free 2-hour workshop with hands-on labs to harden your repos and your workflows from common supply ch…