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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#371

Post by applied_heat »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #362
aeyes wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare also depends on investor money, they haven't made a profit ever and continue to just throw stuff at the wall to grow. At some point in time they'll have to start thinking about profitability.

It's important to qualify this though. E.g. Amazon was not profitable for a very long time, but only because they furiously reinvested everything. They could've turned profitable at any time. Assuming Cloudflare is a similar case to Amazon: ie they could turn profitable at any time but choose to reinvest those profits immediately into more business, that is a very good spot to be in.

Big assumption?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#372

Post by yieldcrv »

arandr0x wrote: post #133
yieldcrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?

In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.

ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth to it after September 2021.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#373

Post by yieldcrv »

tptacek wrote: post #21
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.

We're a full stack platform, most frequently compared to Heroku --- a place you'd run a Rails, Elixir, or Django app.

can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings?

Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#374

Post by ericghildyal »

sriram_sun wrote: post #355

I really like the "Here's what's not changing" section. Honorable mention for Twilio. Also, the kind of platform companies where you sign up and play tend to get acquired and become the kind where you sign up and a sales person calls you!

I've been going through the sales gauntlet lately for a new company I'm working on, and it's ROUGH!

I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been written.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#375

Post by mlloyd »

snowstormsun wrote: post #354
duxup wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your lawn guy’s office has a pool.

Also, the lawn guy now has a pricing tier for different grass heights that all in the end take the same amount of work.

But your lawn guy stays in business - which is relevant to them and to you (for as long as you're a customer). If the market is efficient, there should be reasonable competition that you can switch to that more aligns with your needs.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#376

Post by gofreddygo »

duxup wrote: post #228

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more m…

In the same boat.

I want to see a clear sensible path to sustainable profitability for my core software vendors and I want to see some competition, not too much not too less, just enough.

Unfortunately, very very few companies fall in that narrow category

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#377

Post by michaeldwan »

ignoramous wrote: post #353
maliker wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. They're leaps and bounds better than the container services on AWS and Azure, solidly better than the GCP one. Seems like they could sell to get their exits before too long. Although I would be very happy if they had the pain tolerance to continue as their own company.

> Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. (not privy to inside information) As a customer that would be a catastrophic outcome. Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than most given the founding team has already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell out again.

As an employee that would be a catastrophic outcome.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#378

Post by jacobsenscott »

veave wrote: post #367
jacobsenscott wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it to hire people who understand how a physical server even works these days? Probably most engineers under 40 have never touch a physical machine, under 30 maybe have never seen an ethernet cable...

I suppose you are being facetious because what you said sounds absurd.

I am generalizing for a few lulz. But I've also worked with people who have never seen a physical server - they've told me. And mac dropped the ethernet port from their laptops years ago. I've worked in offices where everything is on wifi. So I'm sure you could find quite a lot of younger devs who have literally never seen an ethernet cord. Fwiw I've never seen token ring hardware.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#379

Post by jrumbut »

mlloyd wrote: post #375
snowstormsun wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the lawn guy now has a pricing tier for different grass heights that all in the end take the same amount of work.

But your lawn guy stays in business - which is relevant to them and to you (for as long as you're a customer). If the market is efficient, there should be reasonable competition that you can switch to that more aligns with your needs.

My lawn guy, and his competitor, just got acquired by a company that only mows the median strips along highways.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#380

Post by tptacek »

yieldcrv wrote: post #373
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a full stack platform, most frequently compared to Heroku --- a place you'd run a Rails, Elixir, or Django app.

can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings? Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support

Vercel (for instance) does pure serverless --- you configure "functions" that are invoked by their orchestrator --- that are all Javascript, or compiled to JS/WASM.

Fly.io takes Docker containers, turns them into VMs, and lets you decide where and when to have them running.

One isn't better than the other; they're just totally different models for hosting applications. The Fly.io model is much closer to what Heroku did, just modernized (with Docker, edge deployments, the `fly-proxy`, etc).

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