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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

161–170 of 476 posts

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#161
post #154

I'm a bit sour reading this. I've always liked fly and particularly the engineering blog, so much so that a couple of months ago I decided to apply for an infra position, to work on some of these very topics. Sadly after 4~5 rounds of interviews (including a workday) they just ghosted me.

[deleted]

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#162

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…

> generous free level of service, This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hosting and platform for "free", but at some point the companies providing it still have to pay the bills. There has to be a better pricing model that let's someone deploy their relatively small, low-traffic app for $10s/month or even $200 - $300 / year for the basi…

If you don't need all that much, Oracle Cloud does offer a free tier for VMs. You get 2 AMD VMs or 4 ARM VMs and even a free Oracle DB, object storage, load balancing and monitoring.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

It's still just a free tier so you can't expect good support, but, it's there.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#163
post #154

I'm a bit sour reading this. I've always liked fly and particularly the engineering blog, so much so that a couple of months ago I decided to apply for an infra position, to work on some of these very topics. Sadly after 4~5 rounds of interviews (including a workday) they just ghosted me.

If that happened, it absolutely was not on purpose. Shoot me an email at thomas@fly.io.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#164
post #88
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of EU companies following this law is exactly 0.

I know I've personally spent a large portion of my time updating systems to be compliant in the last few years, in North American companies.

... Are those North American companies prepared to willingly break EU laws then? Because in my (amateur) understanding it’s logically impossible to satisfy both CLOUD Act requirements and EU data protection ones (not just GDPR, but general due-process rights the CJEU considers required for privacy violations and US courts deny noncitizens).

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#165
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…

Part of what I hated about Product Management at my last role was the consistent helplessness I felt when I was on calls with our customers. I could tell our product wasn't meeting their needs but all I could do was try my best to give the engineers context on how best to eventually meet them.

I remember my first few days on the job just being ripped to shreds by our customers who (understandably) were slighted. Don't miss those days at all.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#166

Almost half of the issues are caused by their use of HashiCorp products. As someone that has started tons of Consul clusters, analyzed tons of Terraform states, developed providers and wrote a HCL parser, I must say this: HashiCorp built a brand of consistent design & docs, security, strict configuration, distributed-algos-made-approachable... but at its core, it's a very fragile ecosystem. The only benefit of HashiC…

We are asking to HashiCorp products to do things they were not designed to do, in configurations that they don't expect to be deployed in. Take a step back, and the idea of a single global namespace bound up with Raft consistency for a fleet deployed in dozens of regions, providing near-real-time state propagation, is just not at all reasonable. Our state propagation needs are much closer to those of a routing protocol than a distributed key-value database.

I have only positive things to say about every HashiCorp product I've worked with since I got here.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now

Unless a company is very explicit about this not being in the books, I tend to share this outlook. From the perspective of a recent founder, it's downright spooky to build around any SaaS, considering how few of them have been around for 10+ years, when that is certainly what our business is aiming for. I know (and share the feels): Devs tend to get excited about the new thing – but if Google Workspace shut down next…

The difference between (free) Gmail and Google workspace is that workspace is a paid product. If you're big enough to warrant an AM, you can get terms which include continuity of business planning if Google does happen to shut down Workspace. (They won't.)

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#169
post #112
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…

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…

> who doesn't want instantaneous global writes

I want to gently note since I see a lot of misunderstanding around Spanner and global writes: Global writes need at least one round trip to each data center, and so they're still subject to the speed of light.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#170
post #159

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, indeed, the exciting part. As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement. And if it did, it seemed like Render was the natural Heroku v.next. One thing we've noticed, though, is that people do actually want Heroku but close to users. It's not exactly edge compute. In some cases, it's "Heroku in Tokyo". In others it's "Heroku, but running in all the english speaking regions". I think the t…

Just partner with Neon or other similar companies in this space. Scale-to-zero distributed databases is well understood technology.

https://neon.tech/

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