I had the same considerations when I self-hosted headscale as the controller for accessing my VPS. However, I figured that it shouldn’t be a big deal, and there’s no chance of someone registering rogue devices on your mesh, because, even though any device can request enrollment to Tailscale, ultimately you need to execute a command in your headscale server to confirm the enrollment/account creation, so there shouldn’t be that much of a problem leaving the web server exposed.

One more question, how did you manage to get the reverse proxy to proxy your pods? I just added two containers to one, and I cannot access the containers anymore by their names. Do I need to expose their ports on the pod configuration?

Personally, I would avoid host network mode as you expose those containers to the world (good if you want that, bad if you don’t)… possibly the same with using the public IP address of your instance.

My instance is only exposing the HTTP/HTTPS ports, those are the only ports enabled in the firewall.

It seems simple. Does it use pasta as the default networking backend? Also, I guess separating each app into their own network is added security, right? So if anything happens to one app, it cannot move laterally to the other apps unless it manages to gain access to the reverse proxy, which then it would be a huge problem.