What OP did could be done with any containerization platform that abstracted away networking, which should be all of them. Personally I think you should always

What OP did could be done with any containerization platform that abstracted away networking, which should be all of them. Personally I think you should always be using containerization, because even single node Docker is easy. If you are running something for real, then definitely use Kubernetes. If you are using containerization, setting up Tailscale is trivial. Whenever you abstract away something, you can swap out core components like networking willy nilly. Of course, you can always over-abstract, but a healthy amount is wonderful for most non-very high performance use cases.