July 2023 Summaries

Tailscale's July newsletter highlights a series of updates and events, including the release of videos from their first community event, Tailscale Up, and new features introduced there. The company announced updates to their iOS app and a partnership with Panther Labs for enhanced log streaming and monitoring. Tailscale is actively engaging with the tech community by sponsoring multiple events such as DevOpsDays Chicago, BlackHat USA, and Women Impact Tech Boston, among others. The newsletter features community contributions, including discussions on Tailscale’s developer-led growth and Zero Trust networking, as well as a guide on integrating Tailscale with 1Password using a bootstrap Ansible playbook. It also covers improvements to their iOS app, a personalized directory tool called Wishlist, and a new log streaming integration with Panther Labs, now in beta. A customer story from Globalways, a German ISP, illustrates Tailscale's effectiveness in ensuring VPN resilience. The company is also hiring and encourages interested individuals to explore open roles on their careers page.

Tailscale hosted its first user conference, Tailscale Up, on May 31, 2023, at Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco, where the developer relations team brought together a diverse group of 15 speakers from four continents to share their experiences using Tailscale in various contexts. The event featured a wide array of activities, including talks, networking opportunities, and interactive stations such as a photo booth, computing conversation cards, and an ask-an-engineer booth. Attendees, comprising university students, faculty, and professionals from different sectors, appreciated the opportunity to connect with peers, discover new open-source projects, and explore innovative ways to use technology like Steam Decks. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the quality of the food and the connections made, and the day was considered a significant milestone for Tailscale. Talks were recorded for those unable to attend, and the team plans to enhance future events based on the insights gained, such as providing more coffee.

Tailscale has released a significant update to its iOS app with version 1.46, focusing on improved design and performance enhancements. The update includes a refined user interface using SwiftUI, making it easier to access and manage exit nodes, which are now prominently featured and remembered for future use. The design changes align the app with the visual style of Tailscale's admin console, incorporating updated color schemes, typography, and status indicators. The update also adds Tailnet lock support for enterprise users and introduces quick-access features such as machine detail views and context menus for copying IP addresses or pinging devices. Despite these advancements, Tailscale continues to address battery life issues affecting a small percentage of iOS users, with ongoing efforts to monitor and improve performance. User feedback has been instrumental in guiding these updates, and Tailscale encourages participation in their TestFlight program to refine future releases further.

Wishlist, created by the command line tool company Charm, is a personalized directory that allows users to browse and connect to multiple SSH services from their terminal, functioning as a homepage for SSH apps and servers. The latest update introduces integration with Tailscale, enabling Wishlist to discover and easily navigate SSH endpoints on nodes within a user's tailnet. Wishlist is compatible with both Wish apps and other SSH endpoints, and using it with Tailscale requires the most recent Wishlist release and the configuration of Tailscale API keys, which are not meant to be long-lived. The Charm ecosystem includes other popular tools such as Wish, a specialized SSH server, and bubbletea, a framework for building TUI applications, all contributing to a robust command line software environment. Additional options and mechanisms for endpoint discovery, as well as configuration hints for setting connection rules, are detailed on Charm's blog.

As of July 11, 2023, a new log streaming integration with Panther Labs has been introduced, allowing customers to natively route their configuration audit logs and network flow logs to Panther for enhanced monitoring and custom detections. Previously, customers could stream these logs to SIEM systems such as Splunk and ELK, but due to popular demand, Panther is now supported as a native streaming destination. This partnership aims to provide fine-grain alerting rules and out-of-the-box detections, with ongoing collaboration between Panther Labs and the service provider to further enhance the feature. Currently in beta, this functionality can be enabled through the admin console.

Tailscale, a company focused on creating easy-to-use, trusted networks for small teams, humorously aligns itself with the pangolin as its unofficial mascot due to the animal's unique features of having both tails and scales. The blog playfully explores the idea of introducing a collective noun for pangolins, suggesting "a network of pangolins" as a nod to the company's networking focus. Tailscale emphasizes its commitment to innovation not only in technology but also in language, while highlighting the social aspect of its remote team, affectionately referred to as "Tailscalars." The piece captures the company's whimsical and creative culture, pairing it with a light-hearted exploration of language and animal trivia.

In a presentation at Tailscale Up, Xe Iaso, the Archmage of Infrastructure at Tailscale, explored the innovative uses of tsnet, a library that enables embedding Tailscale's networking capabilities directly into Go programs. Xe highlighted how tsnet simplifies managing internal services by bundling IP addresses, DNS names, HTTPS certificates, and access controls, thereby reducing the complexity often associated with networking setups. The talk detailed several use cases, including XeDN, a custom-built CDN using tsnet, and Robocadey2, a bot that integrates Stable Diffusion for image generation. Xe also showcased tclip, a self-hosted pastebin leveraging Tailscale's identity-aware networking, and discussed the development of libtailscale, which seeks to extend tsnet's capabilities to applications written in non-Go languages. Throughout the talk, the emphasis was on how tsnet removes the hassle of traditional networking, allowing developers to focus more on their core applications while maintaining secure and efficient connectivity.

Tailscale has updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, opting to store and track changes using GitHub to offer transparency and ease of access for users. By employing a "diff" format familiar to developers, Tailscale allows users to view changes over time and receive notifications for updates by watching the repository. This approach, inspired by GitHub, simplifies understanding of legal documents without requiring legal expertise. Users are encouraged to explore Tailscale's comprehensive legal resources on their Legal page for further details.