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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#411

Post by josephd79 »

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…

I agree, here comes the feature creep. Decisions are made on "What do I have to do to keep my investors happy" not what's best for the product.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#412

Post by kentonv »

skybrian wrote: post #403
kkielhofner wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Fly - a much earlier stage company and them receiving early funding is the genesis of this entire discussion. I point to Cloudflare (what I'm most familiar with). Across their entire stack of compute, storage, db, etc product lines you won't see a hint of region anywhere. It just works, everywhere. Same with Fastly/Oracle (although they like Fly are quite a ways behind Cloudflare). I suspect (hope) that as Fl…

"Won't see a hint of region anywhere" is an exaggeration. Here's the Durable Objects documentation [1]. Don't those "location hints" look like regions? Also, here's the "Data location" page for Cloudflare D1 [2]. See "available hints" at the bottom. I think it would be more accurate to say that Cloudflare's architecture is designed around having lots of regions, automatic migrations between them, and no guarantee abo…

These are offered more as an escape hatch in case the system doesn't do what you want automatically. But the goal is definitely for the system to do what you want automatically, so that no one ever has to provide these hints.

I actually argued against adding these hints at all, since it confuses the messaging and most people don't need them... but they were easy to add and solved an immediate problem for a few customers, so we did.

In other cases we've held firm. For example, some people have wanted to restrict their Workers to run in specific regions because the Worker made lots of requests to a specific back-end in that region. Instead of actually offering explicit hints, we built a system to detect this automatically: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-smart-placeme...

In any case, most people don't have to think about regions on Workers, and for the few that do, our goal is to change that.

(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#414

Post by kentonv »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #237
asim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS. No one cares about regions, you just care that the app is fast and globally available. The way we did things is a relic of the past and everyone mimics it because trying to guide new user behaviour is hard. The reality is we just need the app to be globally deployed with a globally distributed database and anycast DNS to route you to the local most DC. There's a lot more to it, have built this architecture more…

As a counterpoint, anyone working with compliance data needs to know and be certain that data does not cross geo-boundaries. Intelligence data for US gov’t agencies must typically be kept stateside: AWS uses the GovCloud region specifically for satisfying gov compliance requirements. Passing HIPAA data through other countries when not needed to is generally frowned upon - data should be kept as local as reasonably po…

Compliance is a completely different conversation.

In the Cloudflare Workers platform, we have a number of features to control "jurisdictions" where compute runs or where data is stored. These are meant for compliance, not for performance. Our goal is that no one has to think about regions for performance reasons, but certainly compliance issues are not going to go away -- in fact, they are getting more onerous over time. So features to control jurisdiction are likely to expand.

(I'm the tech lead for Workers.)

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#415

Post by kwar13 »

ris58h wrote: post #335
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…

Yeah, my FOSS web-app that used a free plan was shutdown by Heroku a week ago. Never again.

I feel you! Just had to redeploy mine on another free hosting service.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#416

Post by ransackdev »

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…

https://imgflip.com/i/7qwwn2

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#417

Post by tptacek »

josephd79 wrote: post #411
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…

I agree, here comes the feature creep. Decisions are made on "What do I have to do to keep my investors happy" not what's best for the product.

We've been VC funded for many years, so I guess everything we've been doing is creep!

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#418

Post by davnicwil »

mrkurt wrote: post #161
phaer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think fly.io believes that they can allow the bookstore to do so in less than two hours for a price where it's still important enough for the bookstore and profitable - in aggregate - for fly.io. I personally believe that could be true, but their investors going to find out ;)

Roughly this, yes. It's easy to run boring apps close to your users. Thus, people buy computer time from us instead of a place that runs in one city.

I've long suspected this is what you guys would end up focusing on (and applaud it) -almost like an OS for edge compute that abstracts away its details while allowing boring architectures built for single-point to 'just run' on it.

But is there a limit to how boring you can go? Can you truly, fully abstract over distributed systems stuff like eventual consistency and its basically random effects on UX in certain usage edge cases?

Or do you think 'boring' will have to meet you in the middle with frameworks and developer mindset also shifting over time to a more edge-first world?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#419

Post by swyx »

bob1029 wrote: post #241
bfung wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stateless compute is relatively simple to be region-less, but even fly’s homepage has a map of regions. When state is introduced, then CAP/PACELC distributed systems issues arise, and figuring out approaches to deal with them are a must. Read fly’s Postgres docs, and regions come right back in.

> When state is introduced Only the most trivial business systems can operate without any state. If your application has any sort of shared, mutable state, you absolutely need to pick a region, or go really deep into the EC/consensus/clustering rabbit hole. With a dedicated region with 1 big DB, you can achieve latency figures (over the shared state) that would be infeasible with other schemes. Serializing transactio…

im relatively well read on databases and couldnt figure out - what is the EC in your comment? EC2?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#420

Post by swyx »

jeremy_k wrote: post #95
sneak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?

theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
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