101–110 of 476 posts
Not a client of fly.io, but dang impressive for the company to be this open and honest. Definite respect - wish more companies were like this. It puts them on my short list almost immediately for future needs.
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The US CLOUD Act means a EU customer cannot use a US cloud provider to host PII, even if the server itself is physically in the EU, because US law will still compel the provider to yield the data to US authorities. The European Commission is trying to paper over the cracks with a fig leaf of judicial review, but it's only a matter of time until a Schrems III decision from the CJEU invalidates that polite fiction.
The amount of EU companies following this law is exactly 0.
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…
I think RDS, Crunchy, Aiven and others aren't quite there yet.
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…
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This is spot on. I found myself using Fly for a project because it was super easy, not because I needed edge compute. TBH it's still actually unclear to me who needs edge compute? What apps require this sort of infra? It's not 99% of web apps right?
Personally I see this as a 'why not, if it works' type thing. Sure you don't need it for 99% of usecases, but if it just works using familiar architectures then it is also strictly better for 99% of usecases so you might as well, and people will naturally want it. That 'familiar architectures' part is the hard bit, though.
Edge compute can be helpful for static or quite cachable content. But often this is handled as well or nearly as well by a caching CDN.
So that leaves a few cases where edge compute is useful. Where you are globally distributing the data itself (and ideally moving the data around as your users travel or move) which is incredibly rare and expensive to build, and when you need pure computation that needs no request to your backend and if 50ms of latency is important for a pure computation most of the time you can just move it to the client. In my experience these tend to be rare. I would estimate that edge compute is actually helpful for 1-5% of projects, not 99%.
This reads like a mea culpa from an indie hacker, but Fly.io had 5+ years and raised $40M to get these basic fundamentals right. And we get promises of a new status page.
Fly's been many things over the course of its lifetime [0], but I believe their latest pivot (on what they call "Machines") is pretty darn good. I've been using Machines since Oct last year, and things have gotten better week-over-week. Like with any platform, Fly has its own idiosyncrasies, which don't take much to get hang of. That said, I am the only person in my tech shop that deals with Fly. Some orgs with larger teams and heavier apps that deploy frequently or run DBs / disks on Fly (I don't) have had a rough few months; so that's there too.
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…
That comment jumped out to me too, my recollection was that they've been pretty vocal about that not being something they wanted to solve themselves as a core competency. I'm not quite parsing if these two blurbs should still be taken together or if the second sentence is refuting the first. > The second problem we have with Postgres was a poor choice on my part. We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselv…
We are launching our paid tier March 15th and will be production ready shortly after. We are running 20K+ databases and measuring reliability and uptime.
Generally reliability is a function of architecture (we are solid there), good SRE practices, and a long tail of event you live through, fix, and make sure they never happen again. The bigger the fleet the faster the learning.
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Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.
Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now
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…
They build on existing tech that is already working, so it is more stable.
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…
At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we're focused on a developer experience layer on top of AWS/GCP. You might describe it as flyctl for AWS.