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I've tried Defined recently and it did the job just fine, but the thing about Tailscale (and others in the space like ZeroTier) that put it ahead of something l

I've tried Defined recently and it did the job just fine, but the thing about Tailscale (and others in the space like ZeroTier) that put it ahead of something like Defined/Nebula for me is that I don't have to run my own servers/infrastructure for lighthouses and relays. I understand that everyone has their own preferences and some might want to host this themselves for privacy reasons and whatnot, but for me as a single end user I'm glad Tailscale just handles all the infra for me.

rhuber 3y ago
That's totally reasonable, and I agree that using something hosted entirely by a 3rd party makes sense for some use cases. Our reason goes a bit beyond security concerns, in this case. We built Nebula for large scale deployments, and because of that, we have made decisions that lean into that model for hosting. Our decision to leave lighthouse hosting in the hands of users has one primary rationale: We want users to have complete control their network availability. Any downtime of our service should not impact their network availability. You can even host some of your lighthouses inside of network boundaries to ensure that an internal network functions properly if its connection to the internet is interrupted. Other overlay options may continue to work for some time, but new connections are often not possible, and the network can degrade rapidly. Relays are are a similar story, but with an additional reason: We don't have to limit our customers' relay bandwidth due to cost. When hosting relays on behalf of others, we would be transiting a lot of traffic, which has an associated (sometimes unpredictable) cost. By letting our customers host relays, they can ensure relay traffic is just as fast as direclt connections.
nine_k 3y ago
This is indeed understandable. For me, the fact that I can run my own lighthouses and depend on / trust no third party is the big plus. Both cases (third-party and self-hosted) are in demand.

rhuber 3y ago

That's totally reasonable, and I agree that using something hosted entirely by a 3rd party makes sense for some use cases. Our reason goes a bit beyond security concerns, in this case. We built Nebula for large scale deployments, and because of that, we have made decisions that lean into that model for hosting. Our decision to leave lighthouse hosting in the hands of users has one primary rationale: We want users to have complete control their network availability. Any downtime of our service should not impact their network availability. You can even host some of your lighthouses inside of network boundaries to ensure that an internal network functions properly if its connection to the internet is interrupted. Other overlay options may continue to work for some time, but new connections are often not possible, and the network can degrade rapidly. Relays are are a similar story, but with an additional reason: We don't have to limit our customers' relay bandwidth due to cost. When hosting relays on behalf of others, we would be transiting a lot of traffic, which has an associated (sometimes unpredictable) cost. By letting our customers host relays, they can ensure relay traffic is just as fast as direclt connections.

nine_k 3y ago

This is indeed understandable. For me, the fact that I can run my own lighthouses and depend on / trust no third party is the big plus. Both cases (third-party and self-hosted) are in demand.