Welp, turns out Tailscale folks already did this. You should use their operator :)

katsnet lets you use kubectl over Tailscale. It runs as an impersonating proxy inside of the cluster and joins your tailnet as a node.

When your kubectl commands go through katsnet, they will appear with your Tailscale identity:

• for un-tagged nodes, Kubernetes will see your Tailscale login name (email) as the User; it will also see a group named node:<name of the node you're connecting from>
• for tagged nodes, Kubernetes will see groups named after the node tags, like tag:prod

You can use the standard Kubernetes RBAC policies to grant these User and Group subjects permissions within the cluster. For example, user-rbac.yaml grants the admin ClusterRole to my login name when I connect from an untagged node like my laptop.

For a local minikube setup:

1. apply the base manifests:

   kubectl apply -f katsnet.yaml
   

2. create a secret with your Tailscale auth key:

   kubectl create secret generic -n katsnet auth-key --from-literal=key=YOUR_AUTH_KEY
   

3. create k8s RBAC policies for your Tailscale identity, similar to user-rbac.yaml
4. update your kubeconfig:

   katsnet update-kubeconfig minikube
   # or
   go run main.go update-kubeconfig minikube
   

5. done, now you can run kubectl commands through the tailnet!

Generic setup is pretty much like the minikube setup, you just have to update TS_HOSTNAME in katsnet.yaml to the name you want your Tailscale node to have.

Note that any process on any node within the tailnet can make k8s API requests with this setup. katsnet doesn't do any additional authentication beyond tailnet membership.

This means, for example, that you can open http://<katsnet-node-name>/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/secrets in the browser and see all the secrets in kube-system namespace, as long as RBAC allows you to. CORS should prevent any random site from making such requests on your behalf, but there could be possibilities for attackers triggering requests from your machine.

So don't go running this in production just yet.