Tailscale builds a WireGuard mesh with little configuration. Headscale is an open control server for the same clients — you run policy and issue keys yourself. The lab does not use the Tailscale Kubernetes operator; a handful of Deployments and DaemonSets do the job instead.

The goal is one tailnet for laptops and nodes, with Kubernetes APIs and internal HTTP on *.tif.internal without putting those names on the public internet.

Self-hosting the control plane means you own ACL files, preauth keys, and MagicDNS base domains. The trade-off is operational work: upgrades, backups, and policy edits are yours. For a multi-cluster lab that already runs GitOps everywhere else, that trade-off is acceptable.