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Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

christine.website

271–280 of 320 posts

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

#271
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean if my webapps get DOSed or something like that, and I can‘t react very quickly, I could face a bill potentially in the thousands of dollars? Currently considering switching from Heroku, but fixed pricing is a must. I‘d rather they shut down my apps temporality in case something is out of control, then get broke ;-) Any other recommendations besides fly.io?

No, we don't bill people for traffic from attacks. We also waive fees from big, legitimate bursts. The intent of our bandwidth pricing is to allow high usage, sustained bandwidth workloads. It's not to sneak one over on you.

How about you just offer the option to throttle free instances once they run out free bandwidth? That way your free tier will be "safe".

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

#273
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want an unlimited bandwidth promise, I want a cap that I know can never be exceeded. I mean, I use Azure professionally and one of the key reasons I don’t use it to host my own stuff is exactly because it could potentially become very expensive. I’d rather have my own stuff shut down until I decide what I want to do with it. Things like alerts are fine, professionally, but not for things like running a small…

We actually launched with that feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857 No one took us up on it. What we found is that the majority of people want their stuff to stay up, and the right UX for "shut it down so you don't get billed" is not obvious. We ended up implementing prepayment instead. If you sign up and buy $25 in credit, we'll just suspend your apps when the credit runs out. Bandwidth is weird be…

Do you also have a monthly prepayment subscription where the balance is topped up to a fixed (ideally, optionally calculated automatically via web UI by the user)? Naively that's what I'd expect the solution to look like.

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

#274
post #17

Does fly.io have the same git push deploy magic?

Kind of; flyctl deploy will “magically” build and deploy your app. They show how incredibly easy it is to throw this into GitHub Actions, which I’ve probably done about 8 times in the past week, and it seems to work about as well as you’d expect. (My only deviation from the example is that I limit the branches to deploy to just master.) To me, flyctl deploy is perhaps even better, because it is VCS agnostic and integ…

I agree that it's perhaps even better. With Fly, I feel safe that whatever I want to do now or in the future, I can build on top of the building blocks for it—no matter if there's an "integration". For example, when Vercel added GitHub integration, you couldn't trigger it based on specific logic (tags, branch pattern match) and a bunch of limitation that they use them for up-selling (using GitHub Enterprise/Org requires a Pro account).

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

#275

Fly.io is backed by YCombinator In order to increase transparency on Hacker News, it would be nice it the title was changed to include the fact that's it's backed by YCombinator https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/fly-io -- I personally don't think it's better than Heroku, you have much less features, Heroku is much cheaper + they have an unbeatable free tier

Just FYI https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heroku

Hah!

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

#276

Any plans for fly.io to support Java soon? It is a blocker for me at my company.

How do you mean, "support Java"? You should be able to deploy JVM apps here no problem.

Presumably he means support for automatic container creation, such as seems to be possible (for example) with golang:

https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/golang/

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

#277
post #268
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've been kicking around ideas for managing files on volumes. This is a common problem – it's actually more difficult than you'd expect because "securitah". Once your volume is mounted in one of your VMs, we can't run tools outside the VM to let you manage the file system. On something like k8s with vanilla Docker, we could. But no one should run multitenant Docker. Was there a reason for not using something simil…

They do that already AFAICT by using Firecracker.

Unless they’ve changed things, there is no containerization within the VM a la kata. They run their own custom init inside the VM and use it to start the entry point. https://github.com/superfly/init-snapshot is the source.

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

#278
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contractually?

Great question. I want to know the answer to it. I apologize for being skeptical but the wording in the contract seems to be extremely handwavy and they don't give me any confidence that if my bill goes from $4 to $200 that month because I made it to the front page of reddit, my bandwidth will magically be waived. Right now, I feel 100% sure that my credit card would get charged.

Contractually? I doubt it. But they have refunded many, many people on their forums after they report accidental charges. Whether they continue is a different story, but I feel safe using it and certain that I won't be overcharged.

To be clear a bandwidth limit would be awesome! And the pricing may not be for everyone. However there is a large amount of leeway as evidenced by the community forum posts.

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

#279
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly makes K8s better?

It's basically the platform to build platforms like these (and some of them already run on it). K8S offers the same primitives and more, with progressive complexity as you need it. You can deploy a single container with a 1-line command or an entire PaaS subsystem. It's also more portable than any single platform and you can run it on a few VPS instances or your own bare metal. I've also found it far more reliable th…

I’d be very surprised if any edge compute systems run on (a single) K8s cluster. In nearly all cases you’d run at least a cluster per region. K8s also provides no functionality for per region routing or networking between clusters.

That is to say, for most of what fly gives you there is no K8s equivalent.

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

#280

The only thing I don't like is their usage-based pricing. On Heroku I could pay $7 a month and know I'd never be charged more than that. I'm sure when you're scaling a service it's fine - maybe even better - to do it on a sliding scale. But for a fire-and-forget blog site, I don't want to have to worry about stuff like that.

I've actually been deterred from Heroku because of the pricing. I find $7/month too much for a website or a blog, especially as I like starting new projects. There may be months where nobody visits my sites. I pay 2.49 euros/month for a VPS in Germany with 20 TB of free monthly bandwidth, 2GB RAM, 20 GB of disk space, no brainer. It's just a bit more manual.
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