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Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

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Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#11

Post by NicoJuicy »

TLDR: They could have done it cheaper, quicker and without adding DevOps to their workload with just migrating to Cloudflare.

- Vercel: 150$/m.

- Fly: 23$/m ( + managing servers and devops)

- Cloudflare: 11 $/m.

--- (original comment)

They could have gone from Vercel to Cloudflare to reduce their costs.

But that would have been almost no work to create a blog post about :p

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/dep...

Did some raw math.

Cloudflare is 0,15$ per million requests and Vercel is 2$ per million requests.

Their calculation for Vercel was: 77,600 * (2/1,000,000) = 0.15c per monitor monthly

So that's ~0,011c per monitor monthly on Cloudflare. That would be a bill of 11€ per month ( vs 150 € per month on Vercel ). Probably less, since Cloudflare doesn't count idle CPU time, which is very relevant in this use-case ( outbound http calls) ... - https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-pricing-scale-to-zero/

Which is cheaper than their VPS of 23.34$ / month.

And would have avoided managing servers + security to their workload...

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#13

Post by Lucasoato »

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure.

I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t compete with the big ones.

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#14

Post by leerob »

Lucasoato wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t comp…

Edit: Nevermind, wrong thread. Vercel does honor DCMA, of course, though.

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#15

Post by apavlinovic »

lmm wrote: post #10
xmonkee wrote: post #6

Every day I need to add a new feature to my app, I am grateful I picked fly (serverful) rather than Vercel. The fact that as far as I'm concerned, it's just a computer, is incredibly useful. We've added long-running tasks, background jobs, scheduled tasks, side-car processes, custom-code execution, etc etc. Then, the fact that I can run something like Redis or Metabase within the same VPN with just a dockerfile is in…

It's not "just" a computer, a computer is a whole bunch of complicated stuff that I don't want to have to care about. I want to write some code and have it run and I don't want or need to care about the details of how that happens as long as it works reliably. Being able to ssh into your server is giving you more tools to fix problems, sure, but mostly problems that you created for yourself by having a server in the…

[flagged]

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#16

Post by jiayo »

leerob wrote: post #14
Lucasoato wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t comp…

Edit: Nevermind, wrong thread. Vercel does honor DCMA, of course, though.

You work at Vercel. Are you saying Vercel does not honour DMCA takedown requests and that is a selling point of using Vercel? This seems like a strange thing to brag about.

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#17

Post by lmm »

apavlinovic wrote: post #15
lmm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "just" a computer, a computer is a whole bunch of complicated stuff that I don't want to have to care about. I want to write some code and have it run and I don't want or need to care about the details of how that happens as long as it works reliably. Being able to ssh into your server is giving you more tools to fix problems, sure, but mostly problems that you created for yourself by having a server in the…

[flagged]

> If you are a software engineer, and you think that a server is "complicated", then why are you in this business at all?

I'm in this business to solve big problems with a minimum of effort. The three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris.

(I do in fact know how to build and maintain a server. But unless you're getting some unique value-add from doing that, it's a waste of time that you could be spending more productively)

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#18

Post by elliotec »

Lucasoato wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t comp…

Vercel is great for pre-prod ethereal environments for testing and CI. But they desperately want to sell you their enterprise stack which is completely inadequate, and will drag their feet for months if you just want to sign the damn “pro” version.

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#19

Post by crooked-v »

elliotec wrote: post #18
Lucasoato wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t comp…

Vercel is great for pre-prod ethereal environments for testing and CI. But they desperately want to sell you their enterprise stack which is completely inadequate, and will drag their feet for months if you just want to sign the damn “pro” version.

Also, simple stuff like bandwidth is wildly overpriced with Vercel. My company switched away from all their magic image resizing stuff because as our traffic increased the bandwidth was 10x that of doing all media content through Prismic.

Re: Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

#20

Post by pech0rin »

I find it interesting that people seem to be trading short term gains with long term reliability and maintenance costs. This glut of 0-friction deploy services lull people into a nice false sense of security.

But in actuality you are wasting hours, days, weeks of time when they become unreliable, support is unresponsive, or something unexpected pops up.

There is a huge advantage (outside of amateur, low importance projects) for putting in place - at the beginning - an infrastructure that is dead simple and reliable. AWS, GCP may have some upfront complexity but provide advantages in terms of reliability, knowledgeable support, and proven track records.

I would never recommend these current platforms to be used for building a long term business on top of. I have been tempted by the siren song of one click deploys but in the long run so much extra time is wasted.

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