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by ignoramous 1941 days ago
> Regarding the article, it seems like Fly has pulled off some insane networking nonsense

Fly is essentially building a Tailscale-esque infrastructure to service one part of their cloud offering. It is indeed insane the amount of heavy-lifting they do to make it all work. They seem like a cross between packetfabric, gitops, docker, and hashicorp but with way less engineers on the team.
2 comments
brianm 1941 days ago
The technical heavy lift is rarely the success determinant, so having a company implement half-baked (enough for internal use, but without the edges polished off that are needed to support it with external customers) versions of N related (but not yet mature) technologies is pretty normal (if they are full of good engineers) and getting advantage from it.

Most of the time these implementations are too tightly tied to the rest of the company's infra to be useful standalone. When one of those companies succeeds a common pattern is for engineers to cash out, leave, and build a new startup around one technology from the success story.

I would not be surprised if this is one of the forces that drives the consumer -> infra -> consumer -> infra cycle. A consumer wave leads to inventing lots of interesting but bespoke infra while it is growing like crazy. When it plateaus, folks spin out the interesting infra bits until the next consumer wave (generally larger) starts rising.

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mrkurt 1941 days ago
To be fair, what Tailscale is doing is much harder than our private networking. They have to deal with NAT, mobile OSes, etc.

We mostly just try to pick the right primitives. And frequently get that wrong. Like that time we wrote our own JS runtime ...

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mwcampbell 1941 days ago
> They have to deal with NAT, mobile OSes, etc.

Does this imply that the user-space TCP/IP-over-WireGuard trick described here wouldn't work through NAT, or on a mobile OS (assuming you can get a Go toolchain up and running)?

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mrkurt 1941 days ago
It'll work through NAT for sure. We just don't have to think about NAT because we're connecting clients to a network we control. Tailscale is making a mesh across clients behind different NATs.

I know they did a bunch of work to get wireguard-go working on iOS. It sounds hard to me!

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