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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

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Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#251

Post by bradgessler »

nomilk wrote: post #239

What an earnest post, and how damn refreshing it is to see such concern for users, accountability, honesty and openness (quite a contrast to another PaaS)! I moved one app successfully from heroku to fly and attempted to move a few others. These are my experiences (both good and bad): Great: - The load time on the pages is insanely faster on fly than heroku. Sometimes I thought I was on the localhost version of the a…

Did you try migrating with this guide? https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-herok...

The issues you ran into with older versions of Rails was probably because the Dockerfile that `fly launch` generated was for new versions of Rails. We switched to https://github.com/rubys/dockerfile-rails to streamline Dockerfile generation and support older versions of Rails.

If you try it again and run into issues you can open an issue at https://github.com/rubys/dockerfile-rails/issues or post in https://community.fly.io and somebody will help get that sorted out.

The more versions of Rails we can deploy the better!

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#252

Post by Karupan »

Thanks for the honest technical write up - not easy to air one's dirty laundry to users. Given the scalability and stability issues, I am curious to understand the percent of apps deployed to fly are actually used in production/critical to business. Sounds like they have quite a few hobby/free tier users (myself included) who probably won't notice certain issues unlike paid customers.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#253

Post by wbl »

fmajid wrote: post #62
ec109685 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CloudFlare folks wrote a good blog post on how they are seeing their customers use Edge compute — latency is far down on the list: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-serverless-we...

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.

You're assuming that the US doesn't respond to political pressure and come up with an agreement with the EC to enable the flows. The wiretap act already goes beyond the fourth amendment in protection.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#254

Post by zamnos »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #36
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…

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…

Backend simplicity also means a more shallow moat. It makes it easier for Digital Ocean/Linode (Akamai)/Hetzner to offer a competing service with the same backend knobs to turn, should they decide they want to get into that market.

The goal should be to make the backend as simple as possible, but no simplier. Complexity here leads to operational burden and toil. But that's why you hire good SREs and treat them well. What's more important is frontend complexity, aka how difficult it is for customers to use. Backend and frontend complexity aren't necessarily linked, which, imo, fly.io achieves, downtime aside.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#255

Post by josegonzalez »

doodlesdev wrote: post #212
notpushkin wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dokku is also nice and battle-tested: https://dokku.com/ And may I also plug Lunni, a self-hosted Docker Swarm-based PaaS I'm working on right now: https://lunni.dev/ Both work pretty well on $5 servers.

How do Coolify and Dokku compare? I've been aware of Dokku for a long time already, however I've never been confident enough to rely on these interfaces to deploy applications, specially because of their business model to keep things going. I'll have to try them both eventually though, I absolutely hate PaaS honestly, the prices are all just too high, but the convenience is really nice when managing a multitude of se…

Dokku Maintainer here.

I don't really have a business model. I do take donations from Open Collective (and Github Sponsors, which funnels to OC) and there is Dokku Pro, but those don't collect anywhere near the funds I'd need to stop my dayjob (at least now. Maybe someday?).

My business model is that code releasing is something I'm pretty passionate about. Dokku isn't even originally my project (Jeff Lindsay started it, I just took it over), but I've been working on it for almost a decade. It's open source and fairly simple, so even if something happened to me, others could theoretically continue the project on as desired (or build on top of it if need be).

I'd be interested in hearing any of your other concerns though :)

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#256

Post by josegonzalez »

notpushkin wrote: post #248
doodlesdev wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do Coolify and Dokku compare? I've been aware of Dokku for a long time already, however I've never been confident enough to rely on these interfaces to deploy applications, specially because of their business model to keep things going. I'll have to try them both eventually though, I absolutely hate PaaS honestly, the prices are all just too high, but the convenience is really nice when managing a multitude of se…

I think overall Coolify is a bit more modern. It uses some different components (e. g. Traefik vs Nginx for reverse proxying), and includes a UI in its basic package (Dokku was CLI only for a long time, now they have Dokku Pro with a Web UI). Otherwise it looks like the architecture is pretty much the same. Re: business model: both Coolify and Dokku are open source, so even if their development stops, you can continu…

Dokku maintainer here

For proxying requests, Dokku currently supports:

    - nginx on the host (default)
    - traefik (via docker labels)
    - caddy (via docker labels)
    - haproxy (via docker labels)
We'll also soon support nginx via docker labels, which will work around issues where Docker sometimes assigns random IP addresses (and unlock TCP/UDP proxying as well).

I can't say anything else about Coolify since I haven't used it in a while, but I'd be curious as to what other parts are more modern about Coolify than Dokku.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#257

Post by hinkley »

> We’ve put a lot of work and resources into growing the platform and maturing our engineering organization. But that work has lagged growth.

I fundamentally don't understand why people are in such a big hurry to get 'famous'. I've worked a couple of places where the marketing side was working as hard as they could to make sure that our heads were on fire at all possible moments. At one job I had a (very, very junior) manager come up to me and say great news we landed and my immediate reply was, "fuck me". We were already running to stay upright and now we're about to have twice as much scrutiny. Wonderful.

If you push hard enough, eventually everyone looks like an idiot. The number of humans for whom that is not true could fit into a book. Both alive and deceased. They most definitely do not work for the companies I've described, at least not enough of them so you'd notice.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#258

Post by slt2021 »

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)

if you add Akamai (Linode ) or Alibaba Cloud - then it will be come MAAG

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#259

Post by josegonzalez »

satvikpendem wrote: post #223
arjvik wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No experience with either, but how does Coolify compare to Dokku, the OSS Heroku alternative I've been hearing about until now?

Dokku doesn't have a GUI which is the main reason I switched from Dokku which I used to use before.

Dokku maintainer here.

Dokku doesn't have an _official open source_ UI. There are a few unofficial OSS ones (Ledokku is the latest) that I'm aware of.

There is have a commercial offering in Dokku Pro (https://pro.dokku.com). It's paid (one-time lifetime license) but only so that I can at least partially cover my development time on it. The project is enough work on top of Dokku that I feel it is justified, especially as there is nothing stopping others from doing so, OSS or otherwise.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#260

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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