Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.
Instead, I think of hypergrowth as a supply-side attempt to capture a larger market in a highly inorganic way and to also capture the absurdly high valuation that comes with it. Usually through VC.
I think of hyperscaling as more like growth faster than what the team can manage, for any reason.
Not if most of your company was built on investor money.
They want their pay day!
Tailscale is great technology and protocol and facilitates decentralisation.
Hypergrowth is a synonym for unsustainable growth. The headline here is business breaks tech, again.
No it's not. It's often a recognition that just one or two, maybe three companies will end up dominating a particular market simply due to economies of scale and network effects... and so the choice is between hypergrowth to try to attain/keep the #1 or #2 position, or else go out of business and lose all the time, money, and effort you already put into it.
Nothing whatsoever makes it unsustainable. You might be offering cheaper prices during hypergrowth -- those are unsustainable -- but then you raise prices back to sustainable levels afterwards. And consumers got to benefit from the subsidized prices, yay! The business is entirely sustainable, however.
Uber is the poster child of hypergrowth. They became profitable in 2023. And their stock price has ~doubled since. Totally sustainable.
That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.
[0]: https://headscale.net/stable/setup/requirements/#ports-in-us...
https://tailscale.com/kb/1118/custom-derp-servers
My last company ran our own DERP servers to have more consistent endpoints we controlled
I have a todo task to integrate derp into my headscale deployment properly ("finish ansible role"), but when I picked it up last month, I noticed tailscale had release relay nodes, and they seem like they'd be better suited than dedicated derp nodes, but headscale hasn't implemented support for them yet.
tldr: not to hard to host DERP, just needs publicly facing endpoint (incl. letsencrypt) but the built in one is fine. But relay nodes look like they'll be a better option for most and I'd guess will be implemented in headscale sometime this year.
So, things are working as designed for the few people that benefit
Same in the UK, recently.
Edit: your service going down and not being able to take requests from clients does not a network partition make