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Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

christine.website

241–250 of 320 posts

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#241
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel and Github pages would be better IMO if it's a static site.

If it’s a static site then just dump it in an s3 bucket and be on your way.

Static websites have their own issues but an S3 bucket is probably the worst hosting mechanism for them these days. The other services mentioned are much nicer and easier to deal with.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#242
post #239

> I wouldn't straight out recommend fly.io. See, part of Heroku's value proposition was their excellent support. I had asked fly.io to delete my account since there wasn't a provision to delete it from their interface and they never bothered to reply and put me in some kind of shadow ban from re-registering with my email. I mean if this is how you're going to treat your customers, then good luck! I'm yet to try out r…

Same thing happened to me with Lime (the bike and scooter „rental“ company) after they kept charging my old CC even after deleting and adding a new one, which creeped me out as I would hope a delete action on a payment method actually means delete. Instead of deleting my account they banned me so I could never register again.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#243
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I think it's a pretty obvious benefit. If you bundle something into a container, you can probably run it in kubernetes. This uniformity makes it incredibly easy to deploy and scale new applications.

I think what I've heard is the kubernetes end result is very often a massively overcomplicated infrastructure that nobody understands, that's a constant source of headaches and lost time due to leaky abstractions. Disclaimer: I've never actually used it myself. That's mostly just what I've read and heard from people who use kubernetes.

It's like what Hedberg said about rice: k8s is great if you're really hungry and what to host two thousand of something.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#244
post #222

I could relate to the comment on Redis. The only things I can see missing are automated Redis hosting by the platform. There have been so many times I wanted some simple key value store which I do not have to bother about setting up and taking care of. Something like "ambient Redis". It's OK not to have crazy scaling promises. You just enable an API (maybe for a small fee) and just use it. If and when you get big eno…

I've been really loving Upstash's Redis offering. Scales down to $0/month and for my needs (1-3 ops per second) even their high availability Redis ends up being just a few bucks a month. Probably cheaper and certainly easier than spinning a simple instance up on my own, but with performance and uptime guarantees closer to one of the cloud managed Redis offerings which start at mid to high $10s per month

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#245
post #229
post #222

I could relate to the comment on Redis. The only things I can see missing are automated Redis hosting by the platform. There have been so many times I wanted some simple key value store which I do not have to bother about setting up and taking care of. Something like "ambient Redis". It's OK not to have crazy scaling promises. You just enable an API (maybe for a small fee) and just use it. If and when you get big eno…

Perhaps just using an embedded DB would be better in your case? Something like Berkeley DB. Alternatively, just Dockerize it, although I assume it's too much upkeep. While not as "Redis-y", there are some decent KV-ish managed databases out there: - Firestore - Cloudflare Workers KV - DynamoDB - Bigtable

One GCP Firestore tip a lot of folks don't realize for non-client-WebSocket-y workloads you can run Firestore in Datastore mode and it acts much more like DynamoDB. Can turn usage bills from $10s per month to pennies, and IIRC gives you faster response times and higher scaling limits in terms of writes per second

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#246

At one point (a very long time ago now) it was declared that Dogwood was the future and as a result Go would be the language of choice at Heroku and Erlang would be no more. Trouble is that Erlang ran all the important Cedar code (it might still today) and the Erlang engineers didn't particularly like the news that Erlang code was essentially deprecated so they left and nobody knew how to maintain the stack. This def…

I worked at one of the beneficiaries of that exodus with some ex-Heroku Erlang folk. Can't speak to if Dogwood was a fools errand or not but dumping Erlang in favor of Go considering the quality of Erlang talent they had on staff was definitely a colossal fuckup.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#247
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have seen similar transitions in different companies, and while I can't say anything about Heroku, it is often not the target technology or architecture that matters. For instance I've seen PHP -> nodejs transition while moving to micrservices, and while the ideas made sense on paper: - It didn't come from the engineers at large. Most weren't phased by the prospect and the main engine for the change was the top archi…

This is pretty common in corporates too. Shiny new project gets all the attention, funding and management focus. The poor guys left to deal with the day to day crap get screwed over then leave. If they leave too soon its an emergency, if they stay too long they get laid off.

Oh for sure. The last company I worked at did a similar thing and decreed that all Ruby projects would be maintenance-only and all new projects were to be in Golang, despite there being a single golang dev in the entire company (who did not even work in the backend dev team but rather in a "platform" team). Within five months all the Ruby devs had left, so despite not a single Golang project being released yet the company now had nobody who knew how the current system works. Several large outages ensued.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#248
Fly has a nice DX but unfortunately the platform still has major issues with reliability and networking. There are often problems with deploys leading to stuck and unreachable instances or other networking issues. It's probably exacerbated by the new user growth but the slick deploy workflow can't override having an app that works.

Render and others are interesting but K8S is still fundamentally better considering all the DX progress there making it pretty easy to get a container running in a cluster.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#249
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I think it's a pretty obvious benefit. If you bundle something into a container, you can probably run it in kubernetes. This uniformity makes it incredibly easy to deploy and scale new applications.

Yeah if you study over it instead of copy pasting stuff from the internet, I find k8s the best thing for my small projects. I only have to setup a simple dockerfile and helm chart and I can run a new service in my cluster on DO, for which they offer free control plane, and not be billed for a completely new app and have to setup all my deps and env vars in a clunky UI. I can setup scaling, ingress easily, the Datadog…

+1 this is what I do as well. If you have any semblance of uniformity in your project folder structure, you can even automate the build/deploy process with a simple shell script/bash function.

Of course, this quickly stops working once your small projects grow to have multiple collaborators, a staging environment, etc. - but at that point you're running a proper business

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#250

After all the chatter this week, I've come to the conclusion that Heroku froze at the perfect time for my 4 person company. All of these so called "features" are exactly what we don't want or need. 1. Multi-region deployment only work if your database is globally distributed too. However, making your database globally distributed creates a set of new problems, most of which take time away from your core business. 2.…

We’re not “froze”. The last week has been exhausting fud.

That’s a lie. The official freeze for new features started in 2017 and customers can see themselves by reading the changelog.
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