TailScale is a VPN, and the article highlights a recent increase in user base. This is likely due to VPNs being required to access pornographic materials for residents of many US states.
> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth.
No it's not. It's often a recognition that just one or two, maybe three companies will end up dominating a particular market simply due to economies of scale and network effects... and so the choice is between hypergrowth to try to attain/keep the #1 or #2 position, or else go out of business and lose all the time, money, and effort you already put into it.
Nothing whatsoever makes it unsustainable. You might be offering cheaper prices during hypergrowth -- those are unsustainable -- but then you raise prices back to sustainable levels afterwards. And consumers got to benefit from the subsidized prices, yay! The business is entirely sustainable, however.
Uber is the poster child of hypergrowth. They became profitable in 2023. And their stock price has ~doubled since. Totally sustainable.
> Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.
That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.
Interesting post. I appreciate their candor and self-criticism, but, as a customer, I'm consistently surprised by how robust Tailscale ends up being, and how rarely I've experienced an issue that actually broke my tailnet. The sort of downtime that might keep me from accessing the admin tool or something else like that is rare enough, but my nodes have almost (?) never failed to talk to each other. Pretty great.
Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.
The reason for that is that all nodes talk p2p to each other. There is no central communication server like with many other vpn solutions. So even if Tailscale would go down for days you won't have any downtime between your nodes.
It makes me wonder why they do not allow you to have a failover that is in your own tailnet. Ex: let me use one of my servers as the control plane, if stuff goes down let that coordinate everything. Maybe its too close to self hosting for them to do it?
The server that acts as the control plane needs to have full access to the outside internet. You can’t do NAT hole-punching through STUN if you are yourself behind a NAT.
Would you mind explaining this comment? (I worked on deviantart for many years when it started so I'm curious, tho the servers did literally melt at one point)
Hypergrowth can be natural. Random example but what if you designed a microblogging service and all of the sudden the biggest platform gets bought by a facist and users come flocking? You could start turning users away or you could work as fast as you can to accommodate them and make small mistakes along the way. Both of these are reasonable decisions and neither one is really wrong.
Kind of annoying to read. No, the P in CAP theorem isn’t when the client can’t connect to your unavailable service. That would be the A. Maybe it was down because of a P on your side, but don’t start blaming your downtime on network partitions between the client and your service.
Edit: your service going down and not being able to take requests from clients does not a network partition make
This is a common misunderstanding about the poorly named ‘Availability’ in CAP. Availability under CAP means that if your request reaches a non-failing node, that node still responds despite being unable to communicate with other nodes. This is distinct from SLA-style availability, which describes the uptime of the overall system.
I’m pretty sure the partition tolerance they’re referring to is the fact that the tailnet remains intact and continues to operate even when nodes can’t reach the coordination service.
Isn't Availablility the ability to connect to something? If I'm calling from region A to region A servers, and the region A servers' networks go down. Well, my client is clever and can failover to region B servers. Except, all my state and context was on region A servers, and maybe that state wasn't replicated over to region B - that replication might only happen on a nightly basis.
When I reconnect, my dating profile is missing all the pictures I uploaded of me in my new convertible with me lowering my sunglasses and winking at the camera.
The LovinHuggin.com server architecture is Available, but not Partition Tolerant. And after I upload different pictures of me in tuxedos and talking like a boss on the cellphone to region B, I've potentially created a weird "split brain" situation. Region A and region B servers have different views of me. Both views are super hot, but the client might get confused if my session returns to region A when their network heals, and the nightly region replication might be messy with reconciling the split brain. Eventual consistency is a helpful (or fraught) feature to have in the database when things like split brain happen.
holistio|29 days ago
krtkush|29 days ago
oh_my_goodness|29 days ago
stronglikedan|29 days ago
drcongo|29 days ago
the__alchemist|29 days ago
kubelsmieci|29 days ago
John23832|29 days ago
unknown|29 days ago
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heliumtera|29 days ago
1dom|29 days ago
Tailscale is great technology and protocol and facilitates decentralisation.
Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.
crazygringo|29 days ago
No it's not. It's often a recognition that just one or two, maybe three companies will end up dominating a particular market simply due to economies of scale and network effects... and so the choice is between hypergrowth to try to attain/keep the #1 or #2 position, or else go out of business and lose all the time, money, and effort you already put into it.
Nothing whatsoever makes it unsustainable. You might be offering cheaper prices during hypergrowth -- those are unsustainable -- but then you raise prices back to sustainable levels afterwards. And consumers got to benefit from the subsidized prices, yay! The business is entirely sustainable, however.
Uber is the poster child of hypergrowth. They became profitable in 2023. And their stock price has ~doubled since. Totally sustainable.
cael450|29 days ago
That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.
elashri|29 days ago
AndrewKemendo|29 days ago
So, things are working as designed for the few people that benefit
flkiwi|29 days ago
Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.
tpetry|28 days ago
zackify|28 days ago
odo1242|28 days ago
(There is Headscale though)
heyitsmedotjayb|29 days ago
neom|29 days ago
BiraIgnacio|29 days ago
rapnie|29 days ago
internetter|29 days ago
Traubenfuchs|29 days ago
Not if most of your company was built on investor money.
They want their pay day!
wolttam|29 days ago
Edit: your service going down and not being able to take requests from clients does not a network partition make
deep_u|29 days ago
dwoldrich|28 days ago
When I reconnect, my dating profile is missing all the pictures I uploaded of me in my new convertible with me lowering my sunglasses and winking at the camera.
The LovinHuggin.com server architecture is Available, but not Partition Tolerant. And after I upload different pictures of me in tuxedos and talking like a boss on the cellphone to region B, I've potentially created a weird "split brain" situation. Region A and region B servers have different views of me. Both views are super hot, but the client might get confused if my session returns to region A when their network heals, and the nightly region replication might be messy with reconciling the split brain. Eventual consistency is a helpful (or fraught) feature to have in the database when things like split brain happen.
direwolf20|29 days ago
asyncadventure|29 days ago
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