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Why use zerotier if you are already using ssh keys? It wouldn't add any security, and in this setup the servers all have public IP's, right?

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The way I see it, there's a level of complexity above which SSH becomes too painful to administer. So now what? Well, unless you find something inbetween you are up for setting up a full VPN and managing the complexity and security of that. And if your network needs are quite fluid, that itself is going to be a pain. Zerotier to me looks like that "something inbetween". But I'd be interested in Sam's comments.

Exactly -- it is that "something in between"

The nice thing with zero-tier is that it is literally two commands to get your network up and connected.

hide your eyes if curl|bash makes you cringe...

curl https://install.zerotier.com|bash

Then zerotier-cli join <your_network>

Go into the Zerotier web admin, check the box, and boom, that machine is on the network, securely.

Now I can spin up a bunch of containers for exploration/testing/or non-essential like grafana, prometheus, various exporters, metabase, etc.

I try to keep traefik clean and only serving secure traffic to "live" and customer-facing things on 80/443.

Good question. I ship logs and metrics back to my home server that runs grafana and loki. I also run some proxies to machines in other places.

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