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How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

notado.substack.com

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Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#21

Post by bsnnkv »

jonas21 wrote: post #19
throwthere wrote: post #14

I 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?

So interesting to see how different people interpret complexity.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#22

Post by atonse »

tptacek wrote: post #10
CharlesW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Make any device anywhere part of your own private, secure network.”

The challenge is that there's two kinds of VPN users (corporate and retail), and for corporate users, the thing you just described is simply a VPN.

We're a corporate user but to me it was "wireguard + SSO" and I was sold.

The Okta groups sync is a beautiful cherry on top.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#23

Post by bsnnkv »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #17
throwthere wrote: post #14

I 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 headco…

The larger story that I will be telling through this series of posts is the re-integration of the cast that powers Notado back into a monolith; hopefully it's something you and other readers will find interesting!

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#24

Post by tptacek »

atonse wrote: post #22
tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is that there's two kinds of VPN users (corporate and retail), and for corporate users, the thing you just described is simply a VPN.

We're a corporate user but to me it was "wireguard + SSO" and I was sold. The Okta groups sync is a beautiful cherry on top.

I agree: for me at first the mind-blowing thing was seamless IdP integration. (Now I'd have ACLs neck-and-neck with the SSO stuff). But like, the extensible private network thing, that's what corporations use VPNs for. :)

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#26

Post by bsnnkv »

whimsicalism wrote: post #25

3000 users sounds like too few to justify k8s

Definitely. And just think, Notado started off on k8s without any users at all! As the article hints at, the choice mainly came down to laziness and complacency, at the cost of significant added complexity that would be paid by "future me" ("past me" is not always the most considerate...)

I hope that one thing that potential solo devs take away from this post is that you can get very far without even needing to think about touching k8s (especially if you are already very comfortable with k8s).

After all, HN and Pinboard comfortably serve many more users than our side projects likely ever will without bringing in any kind of heavyweight container orchestration platforms.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#27

Post by mbesto »

CharlesW wrote: post #7
crawshaw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks! we have a lot of work to do explaining tailscale. we’re working on it.

“Make any device anywhere part of your own private, secure network.”

Just to further clarify as I've recently gone down the rabbit hole of Tailscale...but isn't the idea that I can make any part of the device running on a private, secure network? In other words, even if I'm connected to a node, I'm still running "on my network", whereas when I connect to a traditional VPN service it just kinda takes all of my traffic and puts it in that same network "space", the biggest difference meaning I no longer see a traffic hit when I'm reaching www.google.com because it doesn't mean all of that traffic has to get funneled through the VPN traffic.

As you can tell, not a network guy here! I could be totally wrong.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#28

Post by dijit »

NoraCodes wrote: post #9
bedast wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, marketing of those tunneling services as VPNs is actually causing damage. Those services are NOT VPNs. Tailscale is very much more like a real VPN than those other things that are pretending to be VPNs.

They definitely are VPNs, just a specific subset of use cases of a VPN.

Semantically: those services are acting more like encrypted proxies, with some kind of exit far away from you physically.

VPN's are usually used to create Virtual private networks. Extending your LAN across several sites using software, or granting you access to your LAN when you're not physically located close to it.

It's hard to imagine why the meaning has changed as much as it has, because even though a consequence of this connection can be that you exit to the internet via your destination networks internet connection; I feel like this isn't the original use case at all, similar to how you can use a chair as a ladder.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#29

Post by skrtskrt »

throwthere wrote: post #14

I 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.

Not even the kubernetes cluster, the author eventually is just running multiple processes in a single VM it seems, and scaling vertically using the VM, which of course could have been done on DigitalOcean.

However, people do seem to love the fly.io developer experience. It's a testament to fly.io that the auther seemed to enjoy spinning up on fly.io.

It's also a testament to DigitalOcean that it wasn't painful or expensive to partially migrate away from their services.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#30

Post by bsnnkv »

skrtskrt wrote: post #29
throwthere wrote: post #14

I 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.

Not even the kubernetes cluster, the author eventually is just running multiple processes in a single VM it seems, and scaling vertically using the VM, which of course could have been done on DigitalOcean. However, people do seem to love the fly.io developer experience. It's a testament to fly.io that the auther seemed to enjoy spinning up on fly.io. It's also a testament to DigitalOcean that it wasn't painful or exp…

> Not even the kubernetes cluster, the author eventually is just running multiple processes in a single VM it seems, and scaling vertically using the VM

This is an excellent summary!

> ... which of course could have been done on DigitalOcean.

> However, people do seem to love the fly.io developer experience. It's a testament to fly.io that the auther seemed to enjoy spinning up on fly.io.

It could have been done, but it would have required me to introduce more moving parts and complexity to handle deployments of updates (do I keep the same VM and SSH in to update? Do I build a fresh VM with the latest version and then cut over the traffic? etc.) It's pretty hard to beat "fly deploy" in my opinion.

Similarly, the vertical scaling story is much more streamlined on Fly.io - it's also pretty hard to beat "fly scale vm".

I've mentioned in another comment on this post about how great the monitoring goodies that Fly gives you for free are.

Another point that I didn't highlight in the article itself is that Fly.io is currently not collecting bills less than $5/month (this might change in the future, I don't know), and if you have a resource-efficient service (or services), with the numbers that most solo devs working on side projects are talking about, it's not difficult to stay under $5/month and have the excellent developer experience to boot.

> It's also a testament to DigitalOcean that it wasn't painful or expensive to partially migrate away from their services.

No complaints on this point; I'm also still very happy with Digital Ocean's managed database services.

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