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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#61

Post by candiddevmike »

jchw wrote: post #46
candiddevmike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

Honestly though, Fly.io feels like it's off into the future in terms of hosting platforms. Undoubtedly they'll have to work on the reliability problems, not denying that - however, for anyone that can tolerate a bit of reliability issues, which to be honest, is more people than will readily admit it, it might just be worth the trouble for developer experience that legitimately feels like it's from the future.

What good is a product like this if it's not stable? Most folks can yolo a global infrastructure if they disregard SLAs...

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#62

Post by hgsgm »

mrkurt wrote: post #49
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power. I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.

Are you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for your existing customers?

Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience?

Or do you lock in customers?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#63

Post by PKop »

yieldcrv wrote: post #16

so I'm guessing Vercel and Netlify deploy cloud functions only to the "least worst datacenter"? while Fly.io deploys compute instances to more regions and also has a database? asking because I've been content with Vercel and Netlify's CDN for frontend assets and simply stopped doing system design around relational storage, when I want to stay on a free tier.

More languages is the bigger difference... also not just cloud functions but full servers.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#64

Post by andrewingram »

fishtoaster wrote: post #31

"Why do startups write announcements like these?" I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read…

Linear waited nearly a year to announce a round, presumably because they did two in quick succession and didn't want to waste the PR opportunity of the second one.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#65

Post by hgsgm »

tptacek wrote: post #32
candiddevmike wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.

We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about peopl…

Does PR know you are posting this? Number of restaurants is a measurement of hosting quality? Uptime doesn't matter?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#66

Post by jchw »

candiddevmike wrote: post #61
jchw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly though, Fly.io feels like it's off into the future in terms of hosting platforms. Undoubtedly they'll have to work on the reliability problems, not denying that - however, for anyone that can tolerate a bit of reliability issues, which to be honest, is more people than will readily admit it, it might just be worth the trouble for developer experience that legitimately feels like it's from the future.

What good is a product like this if it's not stable? Most folks can yolo a global infrastructure if they disregard SLAs...

It's definitely not unusably unstable, at least from my PoV, and in fact, I haven't really been hit by most of the instability personally; or at least, if I have, it has gone mostly unnoticed by me. I had an issue where I couldn't deploy for a while, but the services that were up seemed fine. (Disclaimer: I do not use the Redis/database features.)

That said, the point I'm trying to make is that it is in fact a lot nicer to use than simply YOLOing whatever onto servers. This model of PaaS is basically what App Engine should have been. It's difficult to want to go back once you've used it.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#67

Post by jonluca »

geraldwhen wrote: post #2

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#68

Post by mrkurt »

davepeck wrote: post #54

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?) Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?

Most of Heroku's revenue is from Postgres. They're arguably a managed Postgres provider with some app hosting tooling (this is not fair, but an interesting way to think about Heroku).

We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of apps. So Heroku felt very constrained.

We see ourselves as, like, a good RPG. Quick to get going, rewarding and replayable when you go deep.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#69

Post by hgsgm »

sneak wrote: post #17
geraldwhen wrote: post #2

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.

Does VC like snarky?

Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product.

In a corpo it's sleazy

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#70

Post by OriginalMrPink »

berkle4455 wrote: post #41
OriginalMrPink wrote: post #23

The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing burger.

A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty noteworthy to me. That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/ .

I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific what I don't like about their communication.

"$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.

"There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb."

I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.

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