[cbushko]

I think a lot of people are missing the point that a traditional DB (MYSQL/Postgress) are not a good fit for this scenario. This isn't a CRUD application but is instead a distributed control plane with a lot of reads and a small dataset. Joins and complex queries are not needed in this case as the data is simple.

I am also going to go out on a limb and guess that this is all running in kubernetes. Running etcd there is dead simple compared to even running something like Postgress.

Congrats on a well engineered solution that you can easily test on a dev machine. Running a DB in a docker container isn't difficult but it is just one more dev environment nuance that needs to be maintained.

[bradfitz]

We don't use Kubernetes (or even Docker) currently.

[cbushko]

Hopefully tailscale gets to the size where kubernetes is worth it. It's a complex thing to run and understand but in the end I think it is worth it. It has certainly made my day to day life a lot easier and allowed our tiny team to build out a solid platform. It has greatly reduced the amount of time that our developers need to get a service up and running our new features out.

[bradfitz]

We have a lot of Kubernetes experience on the team. Multiple of us run Kubernetes clusters in our home labs (mine: https://github.com/bradfitz/homelab), and one of us used to be on the Google GKE team as an SRE, and is the author of https://metallb.universe.tf/ (which multiple of us also use).

Us _not_ using Kubernetes isn't because we don't know how to use it. It's because we _do_ know how to use it and when _not_ to use it. :)

[cbushko]

Haha, it sounds like you have it covered. Even more so if you were to run on GKE (which I use and adore).

When not to use it is a tough question. If I was ever in charge of a company, kubernetes would be the only way of running my product that I would consider. I am a fan of kubernetes as I use it every day but I have also been on the other side of the fence. I have run production systems on bare metal, VMs, EC2 instances, etc. The operational burden of anything non-kube is too much and takes time away from solving big problems such as stability, scaling, deploy, monitoring and more. The solutions to the problems become standard, boring and consistent.

I say the above as someone that spent over a year migrating an entire platform/product from ECS to GKE. It is not perfect but so many silly day to day interruptions have been eliminated. Retired and broken instances are a thing of a past. Scaling is easy. Stability is easier.

Side effects of the move are that our Ops team is 1/2 the size it was a year ago (attrition/covid), we are running 3 times the number of product stacks for 1/3rd the cost. I should really blog about that one!

[bradfitz]

Kubernetes support is a top Tailscale request and the community's starting to do it on their own (a bit, in less than ideal ways sometimes) so soon enough here we'll have to end our little Kubernetes vacation and get back into it and make it Tailscale support Kubernetes really well.