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How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#12I fell in love with tailscale as soon as I figured out what it enabled me to do. it was very confusing at first cause I relate "vpn" to something like nordvpn or express vpn when I hear it. but no tailscale is a lot more than that.
thanks! we have a lot of work to do explaining tailscale. we’re working on it.
I am doing a company talk (we do them weekly) about network security and at least the way I was planning to explain tailscale to our staff was via a picture I still need to somehow build, but it goes something like this:
You have a crowd of people (like one of those massive crowds you see in Tokyo etc). And you are both at either sides of the crowd, and you each have a can with a string connecting you to each other – and I explain that the crowd is the public internet, and tailscale allows you to create that string across the whole crowd in a way that nobody in the crowd can ever listen to you guys talk, even though the string literally passes through/over tens of people in that crowd.
If someone has a photo like that, I'd gladly use it :)
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#13How is the latency and performance of Fly.io micro vms compared to, say, a comparably priced DigitalOcean VPS?
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#14I love Fly.io and use it in production, but unless I'm missing something the author would have been better off just running their kubernetes cluster locally on a $6 VPS on digital ocean. That would also obviate the need for the procfile hack and tailscale.
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanks! we have a lot of work to do explaining tailscale. we’re working on it.
I am doing a company talk (we do them weekly) about network security and at least the way I was planning to explain tailscale to our staff was via a picture I still need to somehow build, but it goes something like this: You have a crowd of people (like one of those massive crowds you see in Tokyo etc). And you are both at either sides of the crowd, and you each have a can with a string connecting you to each other –…
That is just a vpn
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#16How is the latency and performance of Fly.io micro vms compared to, say, a comparably priced DigitalOcean VPS?
In the specific case of Notado, the Tailscale tunnel between Fly and Digital Ocean for database access naturally introduces some minimal additional latency.
Besides this, I'm not sure I'm in the best position to compare the latency and performance of a service running 100% on a Digital Ocean VPS vs. a Fly.io micro VM. Hopefully someone else can chime in with their experiences on this thread.
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#17I love Fly.io and use it in production, but unless I'm missing something the author would have been better off just running their kubernetes cluster locally on a $6 VPS on digital ocean. That would also obviate the need for the procfile hack and tailscale.
A lot of super sophisticated engineering goes into solving problems which were created by the engineers themselves and obviously didn't need to be.
I remember hearing that Oscar (a health insurance startup whose main differentiation was having a decent app) ran their own mesos cluster for some reason creating tons of cost and complexity with little to no reason (also operated tons of microservices with startup headcount).
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am doing a company talk (we do them weekly) about network security and at least the way I was planning to explain tailscale to our staff was via a picture I still need to somehow build, but it goes something like this: You have a crowd of people (like one of those massive crowds you see in Tokyo etc). And you are both at either sides of the crowd, and you each have a can with a string connecting you to each other –…
That is just a vpn
Yep. And Tailscale is the only VPN (like a mesh network, not "let me watch BBC Channel 4 from the US") product I'm aware of that someone who mostly understands cans, strings, and crowds, can setup in half an hour (with maybe just a couple questions to a tech person).
I know enough about all the nuts and bolts under the hood with Tailscale and that makes it feel MORE magical to me, that with all those things to deal with, it still just works. And it's no compromise (uses wireguard, etc)
The last time I saw that level of magic was in a product called Hamachi. It Just Worked™ more than a decade ago. LogMeIn bought them and ruined it.
But with Hamachi I didn't know how it worked under the hood.
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#19I love Fly.io and use it in production, but unless I'm missing something the author would have been better off just running their kubernetes cluster locally on a $6 VPS on digital ocean. That would also obviate the need for the procfile hack and tailscale.
Alternatively, they could have just left things alone and paid the $100/mo.
It's odd because this blog post also announces the end of the free beta for the service. It goes in depth about how they jumped through a bunch of hoops and introduced more complexity to the service because they were annoyed that DigitalOcean raised their prices. And at the end they're asking you to pay $5.99/mo for it?
Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
#20I love Fly.io and use it in production, but unless I'm missing something the author would have been better off just running their kubernetes cluster locally on a $6 VPS on digital ocean. That would also obviate the need for the procfile hack and tailscale.
I don't think I'd enjoy managing my own single-node Kubernetes deployment, monitoring, upgrades etc., but some might!
The other point that I didn't really cover in this article was all the monitoring goodies you get for free with Fly; definitely not something to be overlooked as a solo dev.
The medium-term plan is to move the database to Fly as well, but I wanted to share a way for people to do a partial migration to Fly if they are not quite ready for a full database migration.
As for using a Procfile manager being a "hack", once we are freed from the constraints of Docker containers and back in the realm of VMs, I think running multiple processes again becomes the norm.
I don't quite agree with the "one machine (or machine-like abstraction) => one process" thinking in this regard.