Connect with Tailscale
What is Tailscale?
Tailscale is a commercial product built on top of WireGuard®. It allows you to set up a private tunnel VPN in a mesh-style network. In addition to direct connection, Tailscale also has the subnet routing feature using a gateway machine, which should be connected to the target network.
You can use the Solo plan with Tailscale free of charge.
Get started
First, set up a Tailscale account, then install their client software on your machine. The client will ask you to log in after the installation, and then give you your first machine connected to your private VPN.
Follow the installation instructions to get started.
Provision the cloud VM
Next, you need to create a small VM in the cloud, connected to the VPC with the Kurrent Cloud.
You can choose the smallest available instance size, like t4g.nano in AWS, f1.micro in GCP, or Standard B1ls in Azure. For this guide we use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image (18.04 LTS in Azure).
When creating the VM, make sure you:
- Connect the default network interface to the VPC peered with Kurrent Cloud
- Enable public IP if you want to connect to the VM from your local machine
- GCP: enable IP Forwarding on the default NIC
- AWS: disable Source / destination checking
For existing VMs, you can enable IP forwarding too.
Select the EC2 instance in the list of instances and in the Actions menu choose Networking and then Change source/destination check. Ensure that the Stop checkbox is enabled:
On GCP you can enable IP Forward only when creating the VM instance.
On the new VM instance page and scroll down to the Management, security, disks, networking, sole tenancy section, expand it, find the Network interfaces section and click on the pen icon. There, set the IP forwarding to On:
Remember to create the VM instance in the same region as the VPC, which is peered with Kurrent Cloud.
Set up Tailscale subnet routing
When you get the cloud VM instance running, connect to it using SSH. The easiest way is to use the cloud browser console.
After logging in, install the Tailscale client for the Linux distribution used for the cloud VM, following the Tailscale guidelines. Here you can also find required steps for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal) and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (bionic) distributions.
When the initial steps are completed, you should be able to ping the cloud VM using its internal IP address from your local machine.
Next, visit the Kurrent Cloud console and open the peering page. There you will find the peering you created when following the provisioning guidelines. Write down the details from the Local Address and Remote Address fields.
For this example, we will use the following peering details:
With all the necessary details collected, follow these steps on the cloud VM instance:
Enable IP forwarding on the machine:
echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.confRestart Tailscale client with subnet routing:
sudo tailscale up --advertise-routes=10.164.0.0/20,172.22.101.0/24 --accept-routesIn the example above we used both address spaces of both sides of the peering as the advertise-routes parameter values (comma-separated).
Next, visit your Tailscale Admin Console, find the cloud VM in the list and use the three dots popup menu to enable subnet routing and disable key expiry.
Now, visit the Kurrent Cloud console, switch to the Clusters page and choose the KurrentDB cluster. In the cluster details select the Addresses tab and click on the UI link. You should then get the KurrentDB Admin UI opened in your local machine browser.
This is how the network looks like when using Tailscale:
