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Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

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Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#21

Post by vikramkr »

mrkurt wrote: post #11
yingw787 wrote: post #7

Honestly, while I'd love to try this out, I'm afraid of committing to a solution that might not be around long-term, which for me at least overrides concerns of peace of mind and ease of use, and I'm doing a hobby project at the moment. I'm using bare AWS at the moment because a) they gave me $5k in credits for YC SUS, b) they own the physical servers, and c) I can trust that they'll be around a long time, so I'd rat…

We're not AWS, but: 1) we own physical servers and 2) we're profitable 3) have big public companies as customers.

Weirdly I feel like the fact that you are profitable and have large customers could be as important a part of your customer pitch as it is your investor pitch - even if the tech is awesome that trust in the organization to stick around is super important (just look at the trouble around stadia haha). It's like those fintech companies that have "but how do we make money?" To make sure customers know "ok they can make money without screwing me over or ending up having to shut down"

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#22

Post by mrkurt »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #2

Congratulations on launching! Would it make sense to think of this like Cloudflare Workers but for any application running in a Docker container? Are there any restrictions on outbound connections?

There is some overlap with CloudFlare Workers. The big, practical difference is that you can put apps on fly.io that abuse CPUs, write to disk, accept TCP traffic, etc.

Most people we've worked with want to run run apps they've already written (or open source like https://github.com/h2non/imaginary).

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#24

Post by zomglings »

This is an awesome idea and it looks like you guys are executing on it beautifully. Congratulations!

Out of curiosity, what kind of customers/teams are asking you for gRPC support? Is this coming from your enterprise customers or from smaller teams?

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#25

Post by yingw787 »

Actually, one more question...do you guys scale compute and data layers separately, or are they tightly coupled within the same container?

I was looking at containerized PostgreSQL on AWS because I want to colocate a job scheduling tool (pg_cron) with the database process, but RDS doesn't support that extension. Apparently (or at least I hope), ecs-cli compose supports docker volumes through EBS, which is the same base as EKS persistent volumes. There's next to no information for ECS + EBS though, everybody uses EC2 or full on EKS.

I was just thinking, if you needed to handle excessive read load on small quantities of data, having separate data layers would enable you to autoscale db instances while still having the same volumes, instead of using an entirely separate caching layer which could introduce bugs and increase maintenance overhead. If you guys had native HA with docker exec access and passed savings to consumers that would be huge for me and my use cases.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#26

Post by jdiez17 »

Just curious, how do you handle non-HTTP(S) traffic to applications? You said applications get dedicated IP addresses (I assume v4 and v6). Not having the ability to multiplex an IPv4 address (e.g. if I deploy an application that accepts connections on port 1337/TCP) will get expensive quite quickly, so I wonder how you solve this problem! :)

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#27

Post by mrkurt »

PaulHoule wrote: post #17
mrkurt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city list does look random, but it's actually the simplest cities to build out with physical servers + anycast. We _tend_ to do better than AWS on latency to your apps, and from upstate New York you'd probably be connecting to New Jersey. I would be Virginia is quicker than Ohio for you most of the time too.

I have timed Virginia and Ohio and Ohio is 20 ms faster. I discovered this earlier when I was playing Titanfall and noticed a much lower ping to their Azure data center in Ohio. I confirmed it by setting up my own host in Azure. I was thinking of switching to Azure but pretty soon AWS opened us-east-2 and I moved my stuff there.

Huh that's really interesting.

I just checked one of the performance tools we use a lot and it's https://flyio-ui.fly.dev

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#28

Post by mayank »

mrkurt wrote: post #11
yingw787 wrote: post #7

Honestly, while I'd love to try this out, I'm afraid of committing to a solution that might not be around long-term, which for me at least overrides concerns of peace of mind and ease of use, and I'm doing a hobby project at the moment. I'm using bare AWS at the moment because a) they gave me $5k in credits for YC SUS, b) they own the physical servers, and c) I can trust that they'll be around a long time, so I'd rat…

We're not AWS, but: 1) we own physical servers and 2) we're profitable 3) have big public companies as customers.

> 1) we own physical servers and 2) we're profitable 3) have big public companies as customers

Ironically, these also make you a prime acquisition target (because the product idea rocks), which renders your long-term future unclear.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#29

Post by michaeldwan »

sairamkunala wrote: post #23

This is great @mrkurt Any plans to launch any Datacenters in India? could not find any here - https://fly.io/docs/regions/#welcome-message

No timeline yet but we're eager to get into India and South America when we can

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#30

Post by zomglings »

Is it already possible or do you guys plan to add support for attaching persistent storage to applications deployed with fly?

I am building a search engine and this would let me derive your performance benefits using region-scoped databases and search indices.

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