Session: World Wide LAN: Leveraging Tailscale to bring better security (and joy) back to your (tech) life
Remember the joy of working on your home network? SSH (or RDP) to any machine, access your development database, hit your local services—everything just worked because it was all “”right there”” on the LAN.
Today’s reality is different. Your laptop connects through ATO WiFi, your services run across the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), your home lab sits behind a router you can’t (or don’t want to) configure, and that side project is on another cloud provider (like Vultr, Digital Ocean, or Linode). Connecting these together traditionally means VPN headaches, port forwarding nightmares, and security compromises that keep you awake at night.
What if we could have that LAN simplicity back—but securely, at global scale? Using Tailscale’s identity-based mesh networking, we can create a “”World Wide LAN”” that makes your distributed infrastructure feel local again. In this talk, I’ll demonstrate how to seamlessly connect disparate networks across the world: SSH (or RDP) directly to your home or cloud servers from a conference, access a cloud database without complex networking, and access your IoT devices securely from anywhere.
Through live demonstrations spanning home labs, multiple cloud providers, and mobile devices, you’ll see practical patterns for hybrid architectures that are both simpler and more secure than traditional approaches. You’ll leave with the knowledge to eliminate networking friction from your own projects and get back to the fun part: building cool stuff that works.
