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Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#131

Post by rtpg »

nomilk wrote: post #35

I moved a rails MVP from heroku to fly.io. Biggest negative so far: no easy way to reset the database [1]. I'd typically like to blow it away and re-create it frequently as I tinker with it e.g. adding/removing/renaming a column or changing a data type. Those small changes now require migrations, which are a fair bit more work (but not a huge problem tbh). Biggest positive: ability to select a zone meant response tim…

This is stuff where I highly recommend writing up helper scripts. I have one to pull in stuff from a fly Postgres DB, spin up my local docker compose setup, and then pump the data into there.

I think that's the real niceness here, a CLI that is pretty straightforward (not perfect by any means! but I can still wrap my head around it)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#132

Post by lawnchair »

yashap wrote: post #126
habibur wrote: post #61

Would have loved to read how much money they saved from this migration. The number's not there, unfortunately.

Author mentioned here that they went from $200/month on AWS to $90/month of Fly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242923 Pretty tiny cloud costs either way, probably safe to assume they’re a small, early stage startup. But even still, it was likely a bad call to spend significant engineering effort on saving $110/month, which is a rounding error even for small startups. Hard to imagine that time couldn’t have b…

Definitely tiny but we're just overall happier with Fly. The migration in total probably cost us a weekend of work all said and done. We get a lot for free with Fly (observability, multi-region, etc.) so all in all a win.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#133

Post by estsauver »

paulv wrote: post #124
Spivak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network posture? I can’t imagine trying to put the public internet in between my app servers and db.

Doesn't fly.io have tailscale integration?

You still need to go over a public network (as opposed to a network inside a data center.)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#134

Post by dist1ll »

hknmtt wrote: post #130
lawnchair wrote: post #125

Author here. Some folks wanted the details on pricing. Pre migration, the Terrateam AWS monthly bill was about $200/mo. With Fly.io, we're paying around $90/mo.

61$/m for 1vCPU and 8GB ram? Try Hetzner next time, on bare metal, for cheaper.

You can get 1vCPU + 2GB RAM for 3.92 Euro/month at Hetzner. Those prices are hard to beat.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#135

Post by rtpg »

tptacek wrote: post #88
mostly_lurks wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveats: 1) this may not be what grandparent was trying to do and 2) I have limited experience debugging "regular" Docker, let alone firecracker or whatever Fly.io does. With that said, I succesfully deployed a simple Rust/Actix/Sqlite app with a Dockerfile to Fly.io. I then thought I'd try out litestream. For reasons I'm still not sure about, having `ENTRYPOINT ["litestream replicate … -exec myapp"]` resulted in imm…

One of my biggest UX nits with Fly (I have no excuses, I have all the access I need to go fix this myself) is that we "kernel panic" when your entrypoint command fails. Of course, our kernel is not really panicking --- we've just run out of things for our `init` to manage, so it exits, and when pid 1 exits, so does the kernel. But you get the terrifying stack dump. We can clean this up, so that you get a clearer, sim…

> We could conceivably add a flag for our `init` to hang around waiting for you to SSH in after your entrypoint exits. But that's clunky and complicated

This is a common thing in CI platforms, and the way they usually expose this is "run tests with SSH enabled", and they keep it open for 30 minutes/2 hours/whatever until a session closes.

So if I have some app failing, being able to run `fly restart --ssh-debug`, having that first just sit around waiting for the app to boot, and then dropping into ssh would be a very helpful piece of UX. The main thing is cleanup, but y'all charge for compute! You can be pretty loosy-goosy on that one honestly.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#136

Post by ec109685 »

garganzol wrote: post #79
atonse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of “managed” Postgres is the only reason we haven’t moved 100% to fly. The idea of having to do my own upgrades by updating the docker container scares me. I have literally never run a stateful service off docker and don’t see the point, thanks to AWS. RDS has been extremely stable and boring. Maybe it’s out together by similar duct tape under the hood but it’s been incredibly solid for nearly a decade acros…

What stops you from using a managed database from a provider who specializes in it? If Fly builds it, it will create another Goliath who tries to eat everything.

This is an advantage of the big public clouds. Any SaaS you could want is deployed into the same region as your application, so it's essentially co-located and on the same playing field as one of the native public cloud services.

With Fly.io (at least today), this isn't as straightforward given your favorite database is likely not deployed there.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#137

Post by lawnchair »

moltar wrote: post #127
lawnchair wrote: post #125

Author here. Some folks wanted the details on pricing. Pre migration, the Terrateam AWS monthly bill was about $200/mo. With Fly.io, we're paying around $90/mo.

Could you break down the costs of AWS? From your post you say you needed a simple service plus a Postgres instance. I think you can have that for around $50 on AWS using a small EC2 and Aurora Serverless v2 (min $40/mo)

I don't have access to the bills anymore. Two AZs, RDS HA, bandwidth, and EC2 all added up. It's possible I could have cut down the bill.

The initial motivation to migrate was cost, but at the end of the day we're just happy with the Fly.io developer experience. It's a better fit for us.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#138

Post by dxxvi »

dist1ll wrote: post #134
hknmtt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61$/m for 1vCPU and 8GB ram? Try Hetzner next time, on bare metal, for cheaper.

You can get 1vCPU + 2GB RAM for 3.92 Euro/month at Hetzner. Those prices are hard to beat.

You can get 4 virtual ARM CPU + 24GB RAM + 200GB hard disk for $0/month at Oracle cloud. Nothing can beat that.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#139

Post by youngtaff »

lawnchair wrote: post #125

Author here. Some folks wanted the details on pricing. Pre migration, the Terrateam AWS monthly bill was about $200/mo. With Fly.io, we're paying around $90/mo.

How much total time / effort did the migration take and when do you break even on the $110/month cost saving?

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#140

Post by arcanemachiner »

dist1ll wrote: post #134
hknmtt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61$/m for 1vCPU and 8GB ram? Try Hetzner next time, on bare metal, for cheaper.

You can get 1vCPU + 2GB RAM for 3.92 Euro/month at Hetzner. Those prices are hard to beat.

Yeah but the latency on a shared vCPU has been very noticeable in my experience.

For anything serious you would want to run a dedicated vCPU which is several times more expensive (though still quite affordable)

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