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Tailscale and scale

2024-07-27 16:16:14.643431+02 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Tailscale: The New Internet

I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.

In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we’ve been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale. People get excited about deploying to the latest upstart container hosting service because it only takes tens of seconds to roll out, instead of minutes. But on my slow computer in the 1990s, I could run a perl or python program that started in milliseconds and served way more than 0.2 requests per second, and printed logs to stderr right away so I could edit-run-debug over and over again, multiple times per minute.

Holy crap, yes, that's the right attitude. I just checked, this < $10/month Hetzner instance is serving on the order of 600k requests/month. But it also makes me super interested in Tailscale, which seems to be a framework for actual peer to peer Internet communication the way we used to envision it back in the days of protocols like finger, albeit with some authentication layers over it.

I'm intrigued.

Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Perl Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Monty Python Net Culture Python hubris ]

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Tailscale and scale made: 2024-07-30 20:45:56.9261+02 by: Dan Lyke

If they were successful, they would certainly end up as the next DNS-like provider, which is a pretty central position. And it seems a little more compartmentalized than I think is super useful (so, for free, I get 3 nodes on my network? And that's disconnected so my friends can't necessarily see those?), and even my notions of identity are more flexible than that (I don't really have a "home machine", I may as well put my "finger"-esque identity and whatnot on some remote node).

And anything that ties up my home server is going to need some sort of denial-of-service protection, especially in these days of badly behaved scrapers.

#Comment Re: Tailscale and scale made: 2024-07-30 13:54:40.588117+02 by: DaveP

I’ve looked into tailscale for getting back to my wiki and NAS at home, but still haven’t even set up an account. Don’t have a single reason, and it sure looks useful, but there’s something that makes my spidey- sense get all tingly.

#Comment Re: Tailscale and scale made: 2024-07-28 00:21:08.784955+02 by: spc476

Aren't they trying to centralize the Internet towards them? That's the impression I get from some comments I've read.

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