Tailscale Inc. is a software company based in

Toronto, Ontario Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

. Tailscale develops a partially

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software-defined

mesh Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus of index terms that facilitates searching. Created and updated by th ...

virtual private network Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not con ...

(VPN) and a web-based management service. The company provides a zero config ''VPN as a service'' under the same name.

History

Founded in 2019 by Google engineers Avery Pennarun, David Crawshaw, David Carney, and

Brad Fitzpatrick Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980) is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep. Personal l ...

, the company secured funding of $12 million in a

Series A round A series A is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. It can be followed by the word round, investment or financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in excha ...

in November 2020 led by Accel with seed investors Heavybit and Uncork Capital participating. In May 2022, the company secured a $100 million

Series B round A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the p ...

, led by CRV and

Insight Partners Insight Venture Management, LLC (commonly referred to as Insight Partners and previously Insight Venture Partners) is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and internet businesses. The ...

, with participation from existing investors. The company's name is inspired from a research paper ''The Tail at Scale'' published by Google.

Software

The open-source software acts in combination with the management service to establish

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

or relayed VPN communication with other clients using the WireGuard protocol. Tailscale can open direct connection to the peer using

NAT traversal Network address translation traversal is a computer networking technique of establishing and maintaining Internet Protocol connections across Gateway (telecommunications), gateways that implement network address translation (NAT). NAT traversal te ...

techniques such as

STUN STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT; originally Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) through Network Address Translators) is a standardized set of methods, including a network protocol, for traversal of network address transl ...

or request

port forwarding In computer networking, port forwarding or port mapping is an application of network address translation (NAT) that redirects a communication request from one address and port number combination to another while the packets are traversing a netwo ...

via UPnP IGD, NAT-PMP or PCP. If the software fails to establish direct communication it falls back to using DERP (Designated Encrypted Relay for Packets) protocol relays provided by the company. The IPv4 addresses given to clients are in the

carrier-grade NAT Carrier-grade NAT (CGN or CGNAT), also known as large-scale NAT (LSN), is a type of network address translation (NAT) used by ISPs in IPv4 network design. With CGNAT, end sites, in particular residential networks, are configured with private netwo ...

reserved space. This was chosen to avoid interference with existing networks. The Linux client can also send traffic to networks behind itself by disabling SNAT and routing directly to the source IPs.

Supported platforms

The Tailscale client software supports a number of operating systems and embedded software systems, including: *

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

and

tvOS tvOS (formerly Apple TV Software) is an operating system developed by Apple for the Apple TV, a digital media player. In the first-generation Apple TV, Apple TV Software was based on Mac OS X. The software for the second-generation and later ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

* Android *

Synology Synology Inc. () is a Taiwanese corporation that specializes in network-attached storage (NAS) Computer appliance, appliances. Synology's line of NAS is known as the DiskStation for desktop models, FlashStation for Flash memory, all-flash model ...

* QNAP A

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

operator and Docker images are also available.

Notes

References

External links