2024-07-28
- Was reading this blog post from Tailscale. Really interesting stuff. I’m not sure I totally grok it all. But the big ideas seemed to be that Tailscale enables certain classes of applications to be developed/hosted without paying heavy rents to cloud providers. Tailscale accomplishes this by decentralizing the connectivity layer. In technical terms, they make it possible to avoid the hassle of getting/managing TLS certs, which is a key driver of centralized management of connectivity today. And by making it possible to connect computers directly with minimal technical hassle, you don’t have to pay the AWS tax and route all your applications/data through their services (notably EC2 and S3). Instead, you would develop/self-host applications directly on the machines you own, and they would talk to each other directly and securely via tailscale. The blog post seems to think this enables some kind of “new Internet.”
But I’m not sure I totally get that. Honestly, I think part of the challenge is that so much of my time is spent working in the existing, “old Internet”-client-server model. So, it’s hard to see/understand what this would totally change. So, for example, the blog talks about how you could self-host a file sharing application and then avoid paying network ingress/egress fees to AWS when transferring files between devices. Agreed. That makes sense at the network level. The problem is that the proposed “new Internet” solution seems to assume that I have big enough hard drives to store my data. So, what’s confusing to me is that it seems like if I adopt the Tailscale Internet, I’d also have to migrate my stuff off of S3 and onto some other storage system…that I manage? Or would s3 plug into Tailscale too? And whose cables am I using to transfer my data? These questions, particularly how basic/foundational they seem to me, make me think I must not totally get what’s going
on here. And to be sure, I don’t really know much about Tailscale other than it’s an easy way to securely connect to a bunch of devices I own without doing HTTPS certs and public DNS all over the place. If I had to take a guess, I’d expect that the Tailscale folks would point out that, yes, people would probably have to move their data out of AWS, and for people with FAANG-sized workloads, Tailscale is not initially going to be super competitive, as that amount of scale means you would invest large amounts of cash into data centers anyways. But most businesses aren’t like that. And most businesses could save significant amounts of money by migrating off of super expensive AWS stuff and into their own datacenters (or a tailscale-friendly datacenter provider). And then you’ll end up seeing a wave build, much like the adoption of the “old Internet,” where people slowly adopt this new method of managing servers/drives and it gains more and more steam and more and more infrastructure is
built around it, until it becomes the new default and then nobody pays the AWS tax anymore. It’s a compelling vision, in that sense/at a high level. I’d love to stop paying the AWS tax, and much of my development efforts are similarly aligned.
Date
July 28, 2024