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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

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Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#111

Post by quickthrower2 »

bostik wrote: post #79
samwillis wrote: post #18

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…

There's a wonderfully blunt saying that applies here (too): you are not in the business you think you are, you are in the business your customers think you are. If you offer data volumes, the low water mark is how EBS behaves. If you offer a really simple way to spin up Postgres databases, you are implicitly promising a fully managed experience. And $deity forbid, if you want global CRUD with read-your-own-writes sem…

In a nutshell if you offer cloud services you need to be better than the MAG clan, Digital Ocean too. And people will want it dirt cheap. It’s still hard to be a profitable web host as it always was (MAG has the advantage that none of them were web hosts at first base)

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#112

Post by zamnos »

bostik wrote: post #79
samwillis wrote: post #18

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…

There's a wonderfully blunt saying that applies here (too): you are not in the business you think you are, you are in the business your customers think you are. If you offer data volumes, the low water mark is how EBS behaves. If you offer a really simple way to spin up Postgres databases, you are implicitly promising a fully managed experience. And $deity forbid, if you want global CRUD with read-your-own-writes sem…

Where does the misalignment between what the customer thinks they want, and what they actually want fit in to your philosophy? Google Spanner is a great example of this because who doesn't want instantaneous global writes? It's just that, y'know, there's a ton of businesses, especially smaller ones, that don't actually need that. The smarter customers realize this themselves, and can judge the premium they'd pay for Spanner over something far less complex. What I'm getting to is that sales is a critical company function to bridge the gap between what customers want, and what customers actually need, and for you to make money.

The first releases of EBS weren't very good and took a while to get to where we are. Some places still avoid using EBS due to bad experience back in 2011 when it was first released.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#113

Post by skywhopper »

Interesting issues. Nothing surprising for anyone who’s run a global SaaS before, especially if growth has been incredibly fast. I find the gripes about Consul, Nomad, and Vault interesting since it sounds like the problems are mainly due to poor architectural decisions. Fly is rewriting those tools rather than invest in deploying them properly and in the process are running into new issues that those tools have already solved, which doesn’t give me confidence that the path forward will be any less bumpy.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#114

Post by ignoramous »

erebe__ wrote: post #109
samwillis wrote: post #18

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…

You can take a look at www.qovery.com It provides an Heroku like experience but runs on your cloud account (aws, scaleway or digital ocean). They build on existing tech that is already working, so it is more stable.

Save for a few "in-preview" features, Fly was stable too but then they started growing faster than they could keep up (a good problem to have!). Stability isn't a permanent state.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#115

Post by e12e »

LunaSea wrote: post #74
fmajid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This simply isn't true. At least not for EEC(Norway).

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#116

Post by hinkley »

leishman wrote: post #86
samwillis wrote: post #18

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…

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?

I still think that in the next pendulum swing we'll end up with edge computing and (smaller) self-hosted backends. Everything old is new again, and we haven't entirely recreated Akamai from first principles yet.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#117

Post by blowski »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #111
bostik wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a wonderfully blunt saying that applies here (too): you are not in the business you think you are, you are in the business your customers think you are. If you offer data volumes, the low water mark is how EBS behaves. If you offer a really simple way to spin up Postgres databases, you are implicitly promising a fully managed experience. And $deity forbid, if you want global CRUD with read-your-own-writes sem…

In a nutshell if you offer cloud services you need to be better than the MAG clan, Digital Ocean too. And people will want it dirt cheap. It’s still hard to be a profitable web host as it always was (MAG has the advantage that none of them were web hosts at first base)

MAG?

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#118

Post by gizmo »

spoiler wrote: post #95
gizmo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is carefully worded corporate messaging, but because they write for their developer audience it has an informal "oh shucks we messed up bad y'all" vibe to it. But make no mistake, this is 100% corporate messaging. I get that growing is super hard. And maybe fly will grow up to be a good platform some day. But that's the future. Today, they're flying by the seat of their pants and I mostly feel sorry for peo…

I'm not sure why the cynicism around their candor. Do you think it's not genuine just because it was posted by a company employee? Your post implies corporate messaging is bad. And anything posted by a company—or at least I don't know where you draw the line—can be considered corporate messaging. Am I just reading too much into your phrasing?

It's strategic messaging. It can't be genuine, because of what it is. The benefit they get is publicity and damage control, and as you can tell by the many responses here, it buys them time because many developers are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Companies that engage in this kind of candor are careful not to disclose those things that would really hurt their business. Those things are still kept secret. If the CEO accidentally sexually harassed an employee that's not getting disclosed. A mea culpa is only offered for the issues that are already known regarding scaling, downtime, and missing features. Struggles they have because they're choosing to grow so fast.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#119

Post by anurag »

cldellow wrote: post #77
zomglings wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your review, and had a question so I thought I'd follow up here. You mentioned render.com as a competitor - does render host its own infrastructure or do they act as a go-between between their users and AWS/GCP/whatever?

They act as a go-between in that they ultimately host on AWS/GCP. They host their own infrastructure in that they appear to run Kubernetes and have built out their own deployment and service fabric, so they're just using the underlying machines as dumb compute, they're not, eg, building on RDS. In March 2021, someone asked a question about carbon emissions of their data centres. They said they hosted on both GCP and…

(Render founder) We're still on public clouds because even if it doesn't help with margins, it helps us move faster on features our customers want. It's all one big prioritization problem (and lots of little ones too!).

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#120

Post by hinkley »

snapetom wrote: post #100
yamrzou wrote: post #5

I'm not a user of Fly.io. I can't help but notice how remarkable the effect of open communication on potential end users like me. I remember reading about their reliability problems on HN some time ago. That biased my view of the company. After reading this, the open communication and transparency restored my trust in them, and would make them again a potential candidate for future projects. Because now I know that t…

This is probably therapy, but your message and fly.io's post resonates a lot with what I'm going through. I took a product owner role about 6 months ago, my first, with a company that has turned out to be just a mired mess, and a product universally hated both internally and externally. Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversigh…

Architectural astronauts.
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