Tailscale Peer Relays
6 months ago
- #relay
- #tailscale
- #networking
- Tailscale Peer Relays is a customer-deployed and managed traffic relaying mechanism.
- Peer relays can relay traffic for any nodes on the tailnet, including traffic bound to itself.
- Peer relays provide higher throughput compared to Tailscale’s managed DERP relays.
- Testing shows throughput nearing direct connection speeds, often much higher than DERP.
- Peer relays help overcome hard NAT environments and strict firewalls.
- Peer relays are built into the Tailscale client for easy deployment.
- Peer relays run on UDP, reducing latency and resource overhead.
- Peer relays require a single UDP port to be available for connections.
- Tailscale prefers direct connections but falls back to peer relays or DERP if needed.
- All traffic remains end-to-end encrypted via WireGuard®.
- Peer relays are useful in cloud NATs, firewalled environments, and locked-down networks.
- Peer relays are available as a public beta, with free usage for two relays.