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Reliability: It’s not great

community.fly.io

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Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#11

Post by mixmastamyk »

soperj wrote: post #3

For django, they should really contribute to 2 scoops django cookie cutter program, so that you can get an out of the box django instance that can just deploy to Fly.io.

May be wrong, but they seem to be very focused on interesting stacks like Elixir and RoR while building on Go/Rust. The corollary being neglect of the bread/butter stacks with high market share, like Python and Java/JavaScript. Don't think I've seen a blog post discussing those three beyond a passing mention?

Not the end of the world, but mildly disappointing. At least they are all in with Postgres and Linux, a great foundation.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#12

Post by claytonjy »

Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData?

I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service that could pair well with Fly.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#13

Post by samwillis »

tiffanyh wrote: post #7

Would the simple solve be that Fly.io just mark any new service of theirs “beta” for x-months post launch?

None of the services that they have had issues with in the recent past are new, they have been running for at least a couple of years. They would need to put a "beta" sticker on the whole platform for that suggestion to work.

But the post makes it clear that the issue isn't that they had problems with new services. It was rapid customer growth before they had time to scale up the infrastructure as they had planned to do.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#14

Post by jjtheblunt »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #11
soperj wrote: post #3

For django, they should really contribute to 2 scoops django cookie cutter program, so that you can get an out of the box django instance that can just deploy to Fly.io.

May be wrong, but they seem to be very focused on interesting stacks like Elixir and RoR while building on Go/Rust. The corollary being neglect of the bread/butter stacks with high market share, like Python and Java/JavaScript. Don't think I've seen a blog post discussing those three beyond a passing mention? Not the end of the world, but mildly disappointing. At least they are all in with Postgres and Linux, a great…

I thought the only thing their tech stack was all in on was docker images being rewritten to run on firecracker as a substrate.

is it not agnostic about things like Elixir etc, at the tech level, though they've got super nice documentation for those tools you mentioned?

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#15

Post by mmcclure »

claytonjy wrote: post #12

Very interesting to see Kurt assert theyre going to "solve managed Postgres", and I'm super curious to know what that means. Does it mean something like RDS, or more like CrunchyData? I could see them building something RDS-like on their own, but if they're trying to go further than that I wonder if they'll buy or partner with other companies rather than doing it themselves. Neon strikes me as a Postgres-as-a-service…

That comment jumped out to me too, my recollection was that they've been pretty vocal about that not being something they wanted to solve themselves as a core competency. I'm not quite parsing if these two blurbs should still be taken together or if the second sentence is refuting the first.

> The second problem we have with Postgres was a poor choice on my part. We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselves time to wait for the right managed Postgres provider to show up.

> We’re going to solve managed Postgres. It’s going to take a while to get there, but it’s a core component of the infrastructure stack and we can’t afford to pretend otherwise.

+1 to Neon seeming like a good fit, but it's also very much a beta (alpha?) both as a product and company (at least from my impression). I'm not sure that's a bet they'd want to make right now given the context of this post.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#16

Post by nu11ptr »

Not a client of fly.io, but dang impressive for the company to be this open and honest. Definite respect - wish more companies were like this. It puts them on my short list almost immediately for future needs.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#17

Post by willio58 »

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…

Agreed, this is how company communication should be.

I don't use Fly but would consider them in the future even given their recent issues.

I look at this in contrast to Twitter who had/has? an outage today. Their leadership is opaque and doesn't take responsibility for the issues they are causing.

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#18

Post by samwillis »

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 looking for a successor to Heroku. A zero dev ops PAAS with instant deployment, dirt simple managed Postgres, generous free level of service, lower cost as you scale, and a few regions around the world. That isn't what Fly set out to do... exactly, but is sort of the market they find themselves in when Heroku then basically told its low value customers to go away.

It's that slight miss alignment of strategy and market fit that results in maybe decisions being made that benefit the original vision, but not necessarily the immediate influx of customers.

I don't envy the stress the Fly team are under, but what an exciting set of problems they are trying to solve, I do envy that!

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#19

Post by [deleted] »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #11
soperj wrote: post #3

For django, they should really contribute to 2 scoops django cookie cutter program, so that you can get an out of the box django instance that can just deploy to Fly.io.

May be wrong, but they seem to be very focused on interesting stacks like Elixir and RoR while building on Go/Rust. The corollary being neglect of the bread/butter stacks with high market share, like Python and Java/JavaScript. Don't think I've seen a blog post discussing those three beyond a passing mention? Not the end of the world, but mildly disappointing. At least they are all in with Postgres and Linux, a great…

[deleted]

Re: Reliability: It’s not great

#20

Post by ilaksh »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #11
soperj wrote: post #3

For django, they should really contribute to 2 scoops django cookie cutter program, so that you can get an out of the box django instance that can just deploy to Fly.io.

May be wrong, but they seem to be very focused on interesting stacks like Elixir and RoR while building on Go/Rust. The corollary being neglect of the bread/butter stacks with high market share, like Python and Java/JavaScript. Don't think I've seen a blog post discussing those three beyond a passing mention? Not the end of the world, but mildly disappointing. At least they are all in with Postgres and Linux, a great…

You can use any Docker image.
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