Case Study: Instacart reduces developer disruptions with Tailscale

Instacart reduces developer disruption with Tailscale

Instacart, the grocery technology company, was struggling with a patchwork of eight legacy VPNs that forced engineers to switch connections multiple times a day and slowed access to internal resources. The setup was cumbersome to manage, difficult to scale, and disrupted developer flow, with employees losing up to 20 minutes a day dealing with VPN logins and MFA.

Instacart replaced those VPNs with Tailscale, using features like subnet routers, ACLs, exit nodes, and split DNS to create a simpler, cross-cloud network across AWS and GCP. The result was faster onboarding, easier compliance and access control, and near-elimination of support requests related to VPN access, dropping from 10 per week to nearly zero. Instacart also reported zero outages and far less developer disruption overall thanks to Tailscale.

Instacart

Mike Deeks

Senior Staff Software Engineer