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My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

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Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#31

Post by nicoburns »

> But despite how much I want to learn the fly.io platform – it has been a bit tricky for me wrap my head around a good use-case for this type of distributed hosting service.

Worth noting that you don't have to use the distributed aspect. I have my site hosted on a single one of a fly.io's smallest instances (which one can get 3 of for free), and even like this the performance is excellent (50ms response times), and it doesn't have the problem of spinning down when not in use like Heroku's free tier.

It's nice to at least get a choice of regions. For example, the company I work for (not hosted on fly.io currently) only has customers in the UK and Ireland. So it's would be to be able to pop our servers there with a simple config setting.

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#32

Post by kitbrennan »

davidkuennen wrote: post #23

Do many companies actually need databases geolocated near users? I'm working on big and small projects/companies and that has never been any concern of ours. I always imagined it to be something only the very very big players care about. And as a big player I would usually bet on a big partner like AWS, GCP, Azure. Or am I missing something?

Our business has an API that can be used for displaying dynamic information at point of sale (i.e. dynamic in that it cannot be cached and will need a DB call).

While we encourage our customers to try and use us asynchronously, we have a number of enterprises that don't and therefore demand incredibly fast response times with low latency. They pay us accordingly, so as a result we have geolocated databases (in our case though, we are using AWS Aurora replication).

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#33

Post by wg0 »

csmpltn wrote: post #3

An unrelated, yet honest question. There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?

fly.io is a solution but I don't know what the problem is. I can think of it like more dynamic CDN that can have more compute capacity (deploy whatever backed by SQLite/Postgres) to serve customers right way far more instantly.

Most applications and bigger chunk of them, are transactional and enterprise software is all about consistency and accuracy.

Nevertheless, I think its a great engineering fiat in and of itself anyway and hence gets discussed often probably could be the explanation.

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#34

Post by ethbr0 »

CJefferson wrote: post #14
csmpltn wrote: post #3

An unrelated, yet honest question. There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?

My personal feeling (based on what I upvote) is that ycombinator isn't getting enough quality writing about tech issues to fill the front page, so if it's "full of fly.io", that just means there isn't enough stuff about other systems at the moment. Same reason for a while the world seemed full of Rust articles -- at that point in time there wasn't (speaking as a C++ programmer) a pile of quality C++ articles around w…

It seems like a combination of HN "top of mind" (ie that HN users submit articles on things they're currently reading/researching), social "top of mind" (ie that people write blog posts on things their peer group is talking about), and a side effect of HN positional age-decay.

If there aren't new and different articles to fill the HN front page, then there has to be something.

And that something ends up being a base layer of blogs about "current stuff".

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#35

Post by kif »

> But despite how much I want to learn the fly.io platform – it has been a bit tricky for me wrap my head around a good use-case for this type of distributed hosting service.

The distributed features are there for when you need them – I don't think you have to use them. Or am I missing something?

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#36

Post by dfee »

I’ve got a deploy running on Fly.io, but I didn’t go with the buildpack option; instead I’m pushing a locally built docker image (buildpacks don’t support pnpm).

One big miss, though, is you’ll still need a database and s3, so I’m not sure if I totally understand the value.

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#38

Post by pid-1 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #12
csmpltn wrote: post #3

An unrelated, yet honest question. There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?

A big competitor of theirs, tailscale, also does well here. I think the lesson is partly that the typical somewhat-deranged writing style/topics are popular. More companies should try to write engaging blog posts and be more open if they want to be successful. It seems to have paid off for them as I would guess at least some of the people trying it out are learning about fly.io from HN.

> A big competitor of theirs, tailscale, also does well here.

How does a container/database as a service platform competes with a Wireguard as a service platform?

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#39

Post by ceejayoz »

wg0 wrote: post #33
csmpltn wrote: post #3

An unrelated, yet honest question. There have been many posts hitting the HN frontpage regarding fly.io recently. Is it healthy to have so much content about a single PAAS platform showing up here so often now?

fly.io is a solution but I don't know what the problem is. I can think of it like more dynamic CDN that can have more compute capacity (deploy whatever backed by SQLite/Postgres) to serve customers right way far more instantly. Most applications and bigger chunk of them, are transactional and enterprise software is all about consistency and accuracy. Nevertheless, I think its a great engineering fiat in and of itself…

I mean, that's a cool aspect useful to some, but I spent a day getting a Laravel app running on there, all in one region, and that's fine; I'm looking for a place to move my hobby apps off Heroku right now.

Re: My thoughts about Fly.io (so far) and other newish technology I'm getting into

#40

Post by pid-1 »

sph wrote: post #26
davidkuennen wrote: post #23

Do many companies actually need databases geolocated near users? I'm working on big and small projects/companies and that has never been any concern of ours. I always imagined it to be something only the very very big players care about. And as a big player I would usually bet on a big partner like AWS, GCP, Azure. Or am I missing something?

Web Scale was first a meme, than an ideal everyone pushes towards even when deploying their small scale blog. Who knows what'll happen if suddenly you get a million concurrent users tomorrow? Better scale it geographically and put it behind a CDN today. Look at those generous free tiers. Like you said, it's mostly snake oil except for very big players.

I'd say using stuff like Netlify or GH Pages for static sites is worth it even if you have zero traffic. They legit are much easier to use than setting up your own VPS.
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