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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

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Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#31
post #3

For django, they should really contribute to 2 scoops django cookie cutter program, so that you can get an out of the box django instance that can just deploy to Fly.io.

https://github.com/ehmatthes/django-simple-deploy will deploy to fly (or platform.sh) out of the box, should be pretty much the experience you're describing

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#32

Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want. Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it. However, at the same time the market is…

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1. I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one…

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#33

Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want. Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it. However, at the same time the market is…

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1. I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one…

Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#34

Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData? I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service…

Craig here from Crunchy Data. Not sure if you mean Crunchy Data is like RDS or isn't, in some cases we're very similar as a managed service provider. But are focused on a better developer experience and quality support.

We've had a number of customers that use us for the database and fly for the app. We had a user benchmark a number of heroku alternatives with various database providers and we were actually better response time than the unmanaged instances on fly themselves in addition to all other providers they tested - https://webstack.dancroak.com/

I won't speak for Fly, but we're big fans of them and think we pair quite well together.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#35
I remain kind of amazed about how heroku managed to pull off what they pulled off, in the first case.

Also:

> The Heroku exodus broke our assumptions. Pre-Heroku, most of the apps we were running were spread across regions. And: we were growing about 15% per month. But post-Heroku, we got a huge influx of apps in just a few hot spots — and at 30% per month.

I hadn't before seen anyone with a big picture view confirm a heroku exodus was happening, although a lot of people suspected it or had anecdotes.

But if fly is seeing a pretty enormous number of customers moving from heroku to fly... oh wait, now I'm wondering, is this mainly a result of heroku ending free services, and those are free customers coming to fly for free services?

If so... that's a pretty big burden to take on without revenue to match, it does seem kind of dangerous for fly.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#36

Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want. Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it. However, at the same time the market is…

Yeah, distributed systems at the global scale are very very difficult - at least with the Heroku style problem, you'd be looking at scaling in a single datacenter I think - deployments to multiple datacenters wouldn't share dependencies.

I do wonder however if they'd be better off using less l33t tech - do almost everything on Postgres vs consul and vault, etc. Scaling, failover, consistency, etc is a more well-known problem and there are a lot of people who've ran other DBs at tremendous scale than the alternatives.

Simplicity is the key to reliability, but this isn't a simple product, so idk.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#37

Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData? I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service…

Craig here from Crunchy Data. Not sure if you mean Crunchy Data is like RDS or isn't, in some cases we're very similar as a managed service provider. But are focused on a better developer experience and quality support. We've had a number of customers that use us for the database and fly for the app. We had a user benchmark a number of heroku alternatives with various database providers and we were actually better re…

Yes we think they pair well together too. I believe the ball is in your court though. ;)

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1. I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one…

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles. Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1. I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one…

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles. Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

Do you have a guide in mind?

If it's sorting and sifting and clicking a bunch of stuff in the console, that's not painfully simple. If it's some easy cli commands, I think that's in the ballpark...

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