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Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

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Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#41

Post by tshaddox »

jrockway wrote: post #32
Octabrain wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." I think this is a terrible oversimplification and something tells me that you haven't had to deal with a complex database setup from an operations perspective. RDS reduces a huge overhead in terms of operations (ha, backups, upgrades and clustering being the first ones that come to my mind). Be…

I look in the mirror and confidently say I don't know how to run a database. Was the grandparent comment meant to be an insult?

It was clearly intended to dismiss managed databases altogether, so yes.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#42

Post by mrkurt »

sosodev wrote: post #37
mrkurt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is uncommon. When did it happen? We had some cross country routing issues a few weeks ago. We can generally fix these if you don't mind sending us traveroutes.

Here’s the forum thread I made about the issue. https://community.fly.io/t/how-is-edge-routing-determined/96... Traces and ISP involved are in there. Thanks for looking into it! Edit: I just double checked and it's still the same route to the east coast as posted in the thread

Ah, thanks. We'll chase it down. We got a little behind over the holidays.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#43

Post by biorach »

hamandcheese wrote: post #36
biorach wrote: post #24

I'm not sure this is well-known enough yet - fly now supports scale-to-zero services using fly machines - https://fly.io/docs/machines/

Does scale to zero work with ordinary fly apps yet?

Probably. Depends. For a simple app should be straighforward.

I set up a machine - a few weeks ago this involved a few direct api calls using curl - maybe `flyctl` can do it all now.

Then I deployed on that machine a version of my app that gracefully shut down if no requests were received for 60s.

Works great. Shuts down after a minute, boots back up in under a second when a request comes in.

See the docs for details

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#44

Post by funstuff007 »

throwthere wrote: post #6

The article mentions this, but that’s strongly enough in my opinion. With fly you have no managed PostgreSQL. In my opinion, it’s not really comparable on cost to aws when Postgres is in the stack. You do read about interesting hacks where someone will set up rds in a region that may be single digit milliseconds away from a fly region. then, presumably, you could put PG bouncer on a sort of bastion host that connects…

Isn't it usually a bad idea to have the database and application server in different data centers? It is / was my understanding that both the database and application server should ideally be on the same rack.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#45

Post by ckozlowski »

Octabrain wrote: post #16
mike_d wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ It isn't "Managed Postgres," but the differences are minimal. RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database."

> RDS is ultimately a solution for people who look in the mirror and confidently say "you don't know how to run a database." I think this is a terrible oversimplification and something tells me that you haven't had to deal with a complex database setup from an operations perspective. RDS reduces a huge overhead in terms of operations (ha, backups, upgrades and clustering being the first ones that come to my mind). Be…

Spot on. RDS is a solution for people who look in the mirror and say "I'd rather be working on other things than running a database."

(Disclaimer: I'm a TAM for AWS.)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#46

Post by biorach »

mrdoops wrote: post #7
itsmemattchung wrote: post #4

No where do I see mentioned how much was actually saved in dollar figures. What are we talking here—thousands, hundreds? Similarly, I'd be interested in knowing engineering effort involved in the migration. As a software consultant focusing on designing, building, and deploying software on AWS, more often than not, the infrastructure cost issues I've seen have less to do with the underlying infrastructure provider —…

The biggest $ cost I'd have on my radar WRT AWS vs Fly is complexity and need-to-know of employee time to do any given thing. Fly is way easier to navigate and use than AWS and its labyrinth of Cloud Scale™ horrors. The trade-off being you can do more given things with AWS.

Yeah, this. AWS enables you to do anything you can think of, at any scale and complexity, given enough time spent reading their documentation and crafting terraform configurations.

Fly makes it really easy to do the 80% of things that most small/medium operations need to just get done now.

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#47

Post by rendaw »

biorach wrote: post #24

I'm not sure this is well-known enough yet - fly now supports scale-to-zero services using fly machines - https://fly.io/docs/machines/

I've been trying fly machines with terraform and running into one bug after another: https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12... https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12... https://github.com/fly-apps/terraform-provider-fly/issues/12...

I was really excited since fly seems dead simple, but I haven't gotten it running yet...

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#48

Post by mtlynch »

I've migrated several services from GCP to Fly.io, and I've been very happy with Fly.

All of my apps are low-volume hobbyist web apps that run on a single machine, so I don't do any Terraform, k8s, or Postgres, so my use case is a little simpler than OP.

My biggest complaint has been with outages,[0, 1, 2] but that's gotten better. The original architecture meant that larger servers could evict other users' running servers, which they admitted was a bad idea.[2] I'm not sure if they've fixed that since, but I haven't seen it happen in a few months.

>The container logging solution provided by Fly.io is basic. It's easy to view logs with the Fly.io CLI and via the Fly.io dashboard. However, there's only a small window of logs that are kept, forcing you to create a remote logging solution either internal to your application or via a separate Fly.io application that ships logs to an external service. This is a piece of operational overhead that I'd like to see removed.

I very much agree. This is a big feature gap I feel when using Fly as well.

>Fly.io is not a support-first company. If this bothers you, then Fly.io is probably not for you.

>When emailing support, and email is the only option, it can take from hours to days to get a response. Sometimes they don't follow up. It does not feel like their level of support is on par with other cloud providers.

This hasn't been my experience. I go through the forum rather than email, but I typically see responses within hours, even on the weekends.

By contrast, when I reported bugs to GCP through their designated support channels, there was multi-day latency, and they'd just keep dismissing my report.[3]

[0] https://community.fly.io/t/cant-deploy-my-app-in-iad/7746

[1] https://community.fly.io/t/application-vms-down-without-any-...

[2] https://community.fly.io/t/app-stuck-in-pending-state-after-...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/q/53410165/90388

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#49

Post by jjtheblunt »

itake wrote: post #5
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #2

> The main motivation to migrate was cost. Is Fly.io really than much cheaper for hosting CDN/Postgres/Docker Container?

I saved about 25% from Heroku, but fly is much less reliable. I've had TLS certs expire without warning and redis has timeouts

do they claim to warn about TLS certs and pending expiration? (i haven't found that in docs anyway)

Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

#50

Post by mrkurt »

throwthere wrote: post #6

The article mentions this, but that’s strongly enough in my opinion. With fly you have no managed PostgreSQL. In my opinion, it’s not really comparable on cost to aws when Postgres is in the stack. You do read about interesting hacks where someone will set up rds in a region that may be single digit milliseconds away from a fly region. then, presumably, you could put PG bouncer on a sort of bastion host that connects…

RDS works really well with Fly apps. We often see lower latency between Fly.io and us-east-1 in Ashburn than an app does spanning two availability zones in us-east-1.

But, realistically, we'd like a managed Postgres provider on Fly.io hardware. It's a much better developer experience, we need DBs in every region, and our private networking is pretty dang powerful. I think we're close, but we may need to get a little bigger before we seem relevant to them. We're weirdly closer to managed MySQL than Postgres.

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