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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#81
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that be a really short and boring blog post?

I assume their writers can expand it beyond “We’re going to fuck you over, but thanks for all the fish!” Make it sound all smart and snarky and stuff.

Well, now I can't use that title for the post. Thanks a lot.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#82

“ 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

People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridi…

The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#83
I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out?

Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 person team with no need to scale in sight.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#84
post #67

“ 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

This effect is bananas. The internet feels remarkably different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#85
post #65
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the whole point is deploying closer to your users, unless your customer base is the owners of those restaurants, it would be better to deploy to other (even all!) regions

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#86

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?

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, its founders/employees/whatever swarm the comments to try and control the conversation, heh.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#87
Since you're hosting your own hardware, one request: if you end up doing managed Postgres, please give customers as much fast, local NVMe storage as they can use. 1M IOPS? Done. 10TB database on local NVMe? No problem.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#88

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…

If that is the case, then you shouldn't be using Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Git, etc etc.

Companies raise money now to generate cash flows in the future from a wildly risky innovation. Assuming the thesis is correct, the company will then to pay it back to investors (VCs and their investors including Endowment Funds), but also employee and taxes.

As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let government spend in things like education, infrastructure, social security.

It's either this or socialism.

"Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others"

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#89
post #49

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.

Yeah no I have to agree with you on this one. Every company is going to raise prices at one point or another - it might be inflation, it might be profit-chasing, padding for an IPO - whatever.

Just because a startup might raise prices in the future shouldn't stop you from using their products - with a caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator. I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider just in case?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#90

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…

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