When I talk to other infrastructure folks at tech conferences, they’re usually shocked to hear that Tailscale’s infra team is just three engineers

How Tailscale’s infra team stays small

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2024-11-23 03:30:02

When I talk to other infrastructure folks at tech conferences, they’re usually shocked to hear that Tailscale’s infra team is just three engineers. Companies of similar size often have multiples of that. How do we manage to get by with so few people?

The honest answer is that we at Tailscale use Tailscale in nearly all of our infra operations. The response to that is sometimes a bit of shock, too. Although not every company is in a position to use their own product as a critical dependency, we have found we can trust and rely on it, which wipes out whole classes of problems from my daily consideration. Issues that used to give me headaches or keep me up at night at previous jobs just don’t come up most of the time — which is nice, because they really aren’t the kinds of issues that I want to spend time and attention on.

I hear similar stories from friends who work at companies that have adopted Tailscale (and the customer-facing teams tell me there are many more). Everybody’s network architecture is a little different, but there’s also a lot of overlap, so I thought it might be interesting to talk about two particular things I don’t think about at work.