How Tailscale’s infra team stays small

Tailscale's infrastructure team successfully operates with just three engineers by extensively utilizing their own product to streamline operations and enhance security. The company, which provides a programmable network layer for connecting resources across different infrastructures, benefits from using Tailscale as a critical dependency, allowing them to focus less on complex network configurations and security concerns. This approach simplifies managing secure communications between machines and reduces the need for traditional security measures like VPC peering. By using Tailscale, they handle access control through ACLs instead of network-level configurations, enabling easy management of resources across various cloud providers. Additionally, Tailscale's infrastructure eliminates the need to worry about secrets management and TLS certificates, as these are addressed through in-house tools and the inherent security features of their network. Consequently, this enables the team to dedicate their efforts to more engaging challenges rather than tedious infrastructure tasks.