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Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

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Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#21

Post by EqNoteqp »

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #14

The main thing I want is pipelines - review apps, staging apps, and promotion to production, all integrated closely with GitHub, along with a slack integration that lets me do all of it in a public chatroom. Until another service has all of this, we’re sticking with Heroku.

I get the intention with Slack. I’ve never understood, except for the geek cred, pushing work into chat services. Github is open to the team too.

I hear complaints about chat distractions and see engineers create those distractions. I’m at a loss why we want to do that to ourselves?

Nevermind it’s one more pipeline for messages to lost in. It’s needless complexity and configuration too.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#22

Post by jchw »

2c2c2c wrote: post #12

There's a lot of chat about fly.io on HN. possibly just because the founders and friends are posters here. Is there any in depth comparison between them and render.com ?

As an occasional third-party Fly “shill” of sorts, I mainly talk about Fly because I’ve really wanted almost exactly what Fly does for a long time now. I’d tried other things like Hyper, Fargate and Cloud Run, but they’ve mostly been disappointing in some regards, being cumbersome to use or get started with, unrealistically expensive, or simply being too slow or limited. Fly is none of that. It still has some stuff that’s lacking; resizing disks is probably the biggest thing missing; the proxying is surprisingly complete but UDP services are a little awkward; copying data in and out is somewhat tricky, you have to use SSH but over a wireguard tunnel with an ephemeral SSH key and on Windows it’s not particularly fun. (I don’t think SCP is supported either, which is fine, but still.) It remains exciting nonetheless because it scratches an itch that I don’t feel anyone else has really managed to; Netlify and Vercel and probably Cloudflare Pages does static sites very well, but Fly feels like, so far, the first PaaS to do any arbitrary service very well. The ability to throw Docker images into micro VMs with such ease and speed with this paradigm is truly liberating.

edit: As a note, I have not tried Render. I am sure it is fine too. I found Fly first and it satisfies my needs well enough that I don’t feel it is necessary to keep searching, though I wouldn’t mind checking it out just to see what it has to offer.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#23

Post by onphonenow »

I'm using fly.io lightly.

One thing for me - fly.io is cool, does a lot of cool fancy things. However, the basic PaaS stack from Heroku gets a bit lost / not always fully there for me. For a while they didn't really talk about their container deploy story (AWS App Runner / AWS Fargate, AWS ECS). Digging in, it's all doable, but they do so many cool things it sometimes isn't obvious to me how the basics go. That's changed in last year (at least looking at the docs)? I also had some bobbles on UI in past.

I don't need multi-region in my case, but I do want low latency for example. Easy to find this on aws (https://www.cloudping.info/) - a bit harder to get all regions with a ping endpoint on fly.io - I went looking, they have a demo app you can I think find what they see as closest region, but I wanted to roll my own cloudping.info style approach and it wasn't obvious how to do so. I'm getting about 8ms from my home computer to my closest AWS region.

The basic story need for me is github commit -> goes to dev for review -> promote to production? I happen to use containers now (even if inefficient) because getting stuff "working" often is easier -> if it's working on the container on my machine, it'll work up in the cloud.

That said, there is definitely I think a crop of AWS / Heroku competitors that are going to start to be competitive (think cloudflare on primitives, fly.io and render etc on PaaS style).

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#24

Post by anurag »

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #14

The main thing I want is pipelines - review apps, staging apps, and promotion to production, all integrated closely with GitHub, along with a slack integration that lets me do all of it in a public chatroom. Until another service has all of this, we’re sticking with Heroku.

Render has review apps (https://render.com/docs/preview-environments). We're actively working on pipelines (early access ETA late summer).

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#25

Post by st3fan »

For me the missing bit in Fly is scheduled tasks. I know how to solve this by spinning up an app that runs permanently as a scheduler, but basic cron-like scheduling should be part of the platform IMO. All other FaaS-like service do this.

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#28

Post by tptacek »

st3fan wrote: post #25

For me the missing bit in Fly is scheduled tasks. I know how to solve this by spinning up an app that runs permanently as a scheduler, but basic cron-like scheduling should be part of the platform IMO. All other FaaS-like service do this.

I'd love to do this, if for no other reason than I hate working with cron. What would you use it for? What would the ideal version of this feature look like for you? What kind of apps would you be more easily able to ship? Is it mostly so you wouldn't need to keep a single tiny running VM sitting around running cron?

Re: Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

#30

Post by mrkurt »

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #14

The main thing I want is pipelines - review apps, staging apps, and promotion to production, all integrated closely with GitHub, along with a slack integration that lets me do all of it in a public chatroom. Until another service has all of this, we’re sticking with Heroku.

First, Heroku's pipelines and GitHub integration are (or, I guess, were) excellent.

We (Fly.io) intentionally didn't build a pipeline replacement. We exist for one reason: to run apps close to users. We're just now to the size where we can do that well. It'll be a while before we can get good at a second thing. Heroku shipped them something like 8 years after they launched.

At the same time, GitHub actions and Buildkite are _very_ good. They're less opinionated than Heroku Pipelines, but I don't regret figuring out how to use them for my own projects.

I think there's a chance that emulating Heroku that closely is a path to failure in the 2020s.

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