Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 268 posts

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

#61

Post by ThePhysicist »

Who do you peer with in Europe? I see in the US you use Packet (https://www.packet.com/) but I couldn't find any information about the EU, or do you focus on the US market for now?

We're also a LIR and want to build an anycast network (we anonymize streaming data), any helpful resources you can share on this?

Cool product btw! I think this will be a very interesting area in the coming years, the fact that you offer Docker containers is a good USP as compared e.g. to Cloudflare workers, we might even consider using your service ourselves if you provide service in Europe (our customers are mostly in Germany)!

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

#62

Post by zomglings »

michaeldwan wrote: post #44
zomglings wrote: post #30

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.

That's awesome, your use case is perfect for region scoped persistent storage. We're testing persistent storage privately with a few customers now and the results are exciting. My favorite is using minio as a private global s3 for caching. What are you using for the index storage engine?

elasticsearch

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

#64

Post by Thaxll »

What problem does it solve? Because latency is currently not an issue with all the regions from current cloud providers from my perspective. And for all static stuff you can use a CDN that has pop all arround the world / cities.

Not sure I understand the use case of a single Docker image in a city outside of your entire backend services, especially the DB. If your Docker image talks to something else on AWS / GCP for example you add a lot of latency using public routes.

It looks more like: https://workers.cloudflare.com/

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

#66

Post by mrkurt »

tarun_anand wrote: post #47
mrkurt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now we're best suited for app servers, databases won't (yet) run very well on fly.io. We are trying really hard to focus on what we have because it's so valuable but we love DBs so much we might end up trying to "solve" them soon.

But your most valuable customers will need to interact with an app server plus database for any real life use case. Can you share some applications where only placing the app server close to user works? Is the database back in Virginia?

You are mostly right, there are a surprising number of problems that don't need much database interaction. Lots of image generation, video workloads, game servers, etc.

One of the things we want to do, though, is make "boring" apps really fast. My heuristic for this is "can you put a Rails app on fly.io without a rewrite?".

Many of these applications add a caching layer. Normally if someone wants to make a Rails app fast, they'll start by minimizing database round trips and cache views or model data. If somone has already done this work, fly.io might just work for this app since we have a global Redis service (https://fly.io/docs/redis/).

We have experimented with using CockroachDB in place of Postgres to get us even farther, but it doesn't work with most frameworks' migration tools.

We're also thinking of running fast-to-boot read replicas for Postgres, so people could leave their DB in Virginia but bring up replicas alongside their app servers.

If you've seen anyone do anything clever to "globalize" their database we're all ears.

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

#68

Post by mrkurt »

yingw787 wrote: post #56
LunaSea wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the region your infrastructure is located in, AWS doesn't own the datacenter. For example in the Paris (eu-west-3) region, their availability zones are operated on hardware owned and managed by Telehouse, Interxion and Equinix.

Huh, interesting, I didn't know this. Thanks so much for sharing! Do you have a link? I searched and found all three companies, but I only see links to AWS Direct Connect and hybrid cloud solutions. I just assumed if they're creating their own chips, they're probably creating their own servers, datacenters, networks, etc. but I guess I shouldn't jump to conclusions.

Datacenters are weird. They're basically a real estate market, check out Digital Realty Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Realty

Networks are crazy too, especially between continents, ownership of undersea cables is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable

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

#70

Post by mrkurt »

obituary_latte wrote: post #55
bweitzman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one in the Newark area: `ewr Parsippany, NJ (US)` from https://fly.io/docs/regions/

Are these airport names? Just clicked for me. Is this typical across the industry? I think I remember Rackspace also using ord and iad...

Yes! It's really common to use airport codes for regions. There are some really strange ones, too.

Someday I want to have a datacenter in San Carlos so we can have a SQL region.

Post reply on HN