I’ve never used the AWS VPN, but the Tailscale VPN but the two things they’ve gotten right for me are:
- it has been unnoticeably reliable. We were early-ish adopters right as COVID hit; we’re a hardware company and have it on a handful of very remote devices/sporadic power and LTE devices as well as our development machines. The ARM binary _just worked_ on the embedded kit and I often remote in even while the payload is being flown. Automatically picks up right away when in network range, and I don’t ever wonder if I’m going to be able to connect to something
- it’s wonderfully simple to set up. Download the client, sign in using your org’s SSO (or personal email, but that’s for _only you_ and you can’t share with other users), and your machine just magically joins the network, gets assigned a fixed IP, and you’re on the network with everyone else.
during the covid shutdown I had to spend long periods of time away from my apartment (I decided to lock down with my family 3000km away from where I lived alone)
I had only a small window of time to set up some kind of tunnel back to my apt/set up some kind of remote access. I just installed tailscale on an old mac mini, connected a dinky spare usb webcam, and started photobooth just as I had to leave to catch one of the few flights that hadn't been cancelled due to lockdowns and restrictions.
It worked awesome. I could remote in, use the mac to access my backup hard drive, and watch the photobooth camera. The only thing I didn't forsee was the webcam was useless during the night cause I didn't leave a light on so photobooth would just show me a black screen.
During the day though, the camera showed me my worldly possessions and helped me monitor my apartment so in case anything happened I could call the superintendant of my apartment. It worked really well, and worked for 3 months until the connection died. I only had 1 month left so I left it alone.
4 months after leaving my apartment, I went back and found out the mac mini suffered from hardware failure (would no longer power on), so the tailscale vpn worked and was more reliable/more solid than the hardware it was running on.
After that experience, I am sold on tailscale. They're awesome.
