Live data from Hacker News

How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

notado.substack.com

81–90 of 112 posts

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#81

3000 users? You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. Get a vultr 5 dollar micro instance. I don't know why all these engineer driven businesses focus on the wrong things. You don't need fly.io. Of course they will tell you you need them, I don't blame them. But fly.io or kubernetes should always be done by a migration team which you can hire once you have insane profits. Yes profits, the other tiny detai…

Even if it would be best for the company, "managing VMs" is less impressive on a resume than "set up auto-scaling and server IAM utilizing fly.io and Tailscale".

I’m not sure resume-driven development is a trend we should embrace.

(Even if we all acknowledge that it is one motivation for many tech fads).

Honestly, if this is on a resume the next question should be — tell me why you needed such a system…

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#82

3000 users? You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. Get a vultr 5 dollar micro instance. I don't know why all these engineer driven businesses focus on the wrong things. You don't need fly.io. Of course they will tell you you need them, I don't blame them. But fly.io or kubernetes should always be done by a migration team which you can hire once you have insane profits. Yes profits, the other tiny detai…

You can save the data on disk and not worry about it.

Like in sqlite or something like json files?

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#83
post #80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. I one day aspire to have the cajones of ilrwbwrkhv. For the reference of other potential solo devs, if done right, Fly.io will still be cheaper than the Vultr 5 dollar micro instance (or equivalent) with an incomparably better DX.

FYI it’s cojones, not cajones. This is a typical misspelling. A cajón is a wooden drawer or box. A cojón is the singular of cojones.

Maybe they covet ilrwbwrkhv's worldly possessions, due to their financial success stemming from their ability to reliably write files to local storage devices.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s is a complexity sinkhole for 99% of companies. It's an insult.

Uh huh here we go. What other tool do you propose for running many containers with dependencies on one another? Or why should I target a bunch of different cloud APIs to make my tool consumable when I can target one?

What problem do those containers solve for you that you can't solve with a VPS?

What cloud APIs are involved in running Linux on a VPS? Backups for your VPS are often one click to set up, and the only vendor-specific service you need.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#85
post #82

3000 users? You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. Get a vultr 5 dollar micro instance. I don't know why all these engineer driven businesses focus on the wrong things. You don't need fly.io. Of course they will tell you you need them, I don't blame them. But fly.io or kubernetes should always be done by a migration team which you can hire once you have insane profits. Yes profits, the other tiny detai…

You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. Like in sqlite or something like json files?

Filesystems have a lot more flexibility than just storing JSON or databases. A notes app probably should just store markdown files with some links between each other, and a few small databases for indexes.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#86
post #73
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the threat of a much higher bill if done wrong. That $2.50 vultr instance provides a lot more like 20 gigs of storage nevermind security of a fixed bill. You might be able to save a little, you might pay a lot more. Hedge your bet and use vultr.

Or just have billing alerts...

Billing alerts can tell you exactly when you have spent 4 figures after the fact. Using a VPS prevents 4-figure bills.

Actual billing caps are very hard for cloud providers to implement with the HA distributed systems clouds use for billing, and would carry a significant performance cost. Alerts are the best you can do if you take the variable costs.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#87
post #59
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can save the data on disk and not worry about it. I one day aspire to have the cajones of ilrwbwrkhv. For the reference of other potential solo devs, if done right, Fly.io will still be cheaper than the Vultr 5 dollar micro instance (or equivalent) with an incomparably better DX.

With the threat of a much higher bill if done wrong. That $2.50 vultr instance provides a lot more like 20 gigs of storage nevermind security of a fixed bill. You might be able to save a little, you might pay a lot more. Hedge your bet and use vultr.

I actually use fly.io for the rare time I want to run something in the cloud, for exactly the reason that they allow you to pre-pay a fixed amount, and once that runs out, your instance gets shut down.

This means that I can't misconfigure my way to a three-figure-plus bill, which is hard to find in cloud providers.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#88
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m thinking about a simple blog. Someone convince me that I should use fly.io and caddy and how/why deployment and subsequent blog/post updates would be easy and uncomplicated.

I'm afraid I couldn't make that argument with a straight face. I would recommend that you go with something like Hugo[1], throw it on an S3(-compatible) bucket and be done with it.[2] [1] https://gohugo.io/ [2] This is what I have been doing for my personal blog and for my wife's professional website for many years and I am very content with it

I did that too, but would never use Hugo for any website again!

Instead, I would now use Astro[1] for any static site or blog.

YMMV, but if you don't already love golang and their weird template language, Astro is just HTML and TypeScript and is overall simpler and less time-consuming to understand.

(I mean it will get hella complicated if you want it to, and let you integrate React or Svelte or blah blah, but out of the box it works great for generating static sites like blogs, or just regular-ass websites.)

[1]: https://astro.build

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#89

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.

If you can host your app on a $6 VPS, using a Kubernetes cluster seems like adding a little bit of overhead for no gains.

Re: How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado

#90
Mentally 6$ is a lot for a bookmarking service to me at first, but I can imagine getting a lot of value out of it.

> Users will always have access to all of their previously saved content regardless of subscription status.

> There will always be a quick and easy way to export all of your content

I like the respect you're showing your users. I would feel more at ease using a service that I know I could host myself, but this is probably the next best thing.

Post reply on HN