Self-Hosting Your VPN Coordination: Running Headscale at Scale

Tailscale is genuinely one of the best pieces of infrastructure software I’ve used. WireGuard under the hood, zero-config peer-to-peer networking, and it Just Works on every OS. The problem is the coordination server — the thing that manages node registration, key distribution, and ACL policy — is Tailscale’s hosted service. For a healthcare company, putting …

Distributed Tracing in Production: What We Learned Instrumenting Our .NET Services

There’s a specific kind of production incident I used to dread: the slow request that only happens under load, that doesn’t throw an exception, that isn’t obviously caused by any single service. It just takes too long. And you have no idea why. Distributed tracing is the answer to that dread. Here’s what we actually …

Why I Run Nomad Instead of Kubernetes (And Sleep Better for It)

Every time I mention we run HashiCorp Nomad instead of Kubernetes, I get the same reaction: a slight pause, then “…why?” The assumption is that Kubernetes is the obvious choice for container orchestration, and anything else is either legacy or contrarian. Neither is true. Here’s the actual reasoning. The Problem with Defaulting to Kubernetes Kubernetes …