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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

451–460 of 484 posts

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#451

Fly.io marketing is top notch. Unlike fly.io, https://controlplane.com lets you run at the edge, super easily but on any compute substrate, not just on one vendor's (Equinix). Your own machines, your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Hetzner, Linode, Contabo, etc. accounts, or on Control Plane's many locations in all clouds. On Control Plane you instantly define a "Global Virtual Cloud" made up of any location you specify…

What do you mean by "your own machines", especially given you mention Equinix who host physical servers.

I mean you can use any physical or virtual machines, on premises or in any hosting/cloud provider (in your account) or virtual machines CPLN provides at the hyper-scalers.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the SVB collapse, hopefully they have the $100MM as $250K in 4000 different bank accounts to duck under those FDIC insurance limits.

That would be $1 billion :-) So I guess 400 bank accounts would be enough?

Whoopsie. I can haz calcul8tr?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#454
Edge computing is definitely the last way hosting providers have found to vendor lock you in. Many companies like 37Signals realize that all the fancy cloud provider services have a huge cost because they literally hold you hostage to the mercy of their pricing teams. In a time of high interest rates, I deeply value our commitment to open source container solutions. The only thing we can't do at the moment is to spin an edge network; that's their mote, and why keep doubling down on edge. They double down regardless of knowing most apps top performance offenders don't include the latency to the end user. The bookstore they mention in the article would be much better off deploying all containers in a single cheap commoditized VPS with docker compose, that'd reduce latency between services, and then they can concentrate on optimizing their app and their DB queries. Don't waste time in saving a few milliseconds between your server and the end user, opening a massive can of worms that includes distributed databases, complex infrastructure, vendor lock in, and many other issues they'd happily charge you for.

I wrote a simple library to deploy with docker compose that includes logging, metrics, and a few other utils. https://lostdock.com

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#455
post #299
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious have you ever tried to raise money for a tech business before? There's a big reason VC and angels were and largely continue to be only game in town. No one understands or would risk loaning millions of dollars on a high risk business aiming for marginal incremental growth.

> marginal incremental growth VC's and angels wouldn't be interested in that, either.

Yes that's my point, I was paraphrasing OPs pitch

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#457
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only talking about the parent comment in my reply. But okay, I'll bite. How is fly.io not the Web?

I’m not sure I follow. It seems like a strawman question of some kind. Well, fly.io is not the Web, but also it’s not the point The closest I can get to what your questions is to say, it’s under the control of a for-profit company financing itself with shareholders who want to see profits? That’s true of many companies, the sentiment in the GP comments applies to the general pattern of becoming enshittified after a l…

But it exposes things on the Web. And if you don't like them you can move somewhere else?

And more generally: people do things for money. Companies wanting a profit is not a bad thing. That urge can go wrong, but that risk is mitigated, in fly.io's case better than most, by the lack of lock-in technology choices.

For example, if you want to, for some insane reason, build an application that uses Microsoft's CosmosDB, then your data is stuck in Azure forever. Fly.io doesn't have that problem, as they use things you can run elsewhere.

So: what is the problem, as pertaining to the topic of this comment page: fly.io?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#458
post #444
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes:…

>Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us Speak for yourself. Announcements of adequate funding inspires confidence fly will have longevity and resources to scale. Other concerns can be tackled in other blog posts, but nothing about the announcement of funding should inspire less confidence, what sense does that make?

The issue is not raising money, precisely, the issue is raising money by selling large amounts of controlling equity (as is usually the case for VC funding and IPOs, with a few notable exceptions). The purchasers will expect their money’s worth, and they will (eventually) not hesitate to exercise the control it bought them in order to get that.

VCs in particular will expect much more than their money’s worth, or (most of the time) for the company to die trying to earn it, and they won’t hesitate to force the latter in pursuit of the former. This increase in variance is literally their investment model.

So if VCs expect their investments to fail most of the time, and I see a company take VC money, I must have very strong reasons if I’m to disbelieve the VCs and expect the company to succeed—and I’m not following a venture investment strategy when I choose a tech supplier.

IPOs are somewhat milder in their intrinsic character, but they still usually lead to professional boards of directors and eventually professional execs, where “professional” usually means “no subject matter expertise”. And hardly anybody runs a public company on customer satisfaction nowadays, unfortunately.

So when I see controlling equity sold, my outlook changes from “will this go to shit?” to “when this inevitably goes to shit, will it be in the distant enough future that I don’t care or can plan for the loss?” (that being maybe a decade or so for infra, or implausibly long—like the rest of my natural life—for anything involving a community).

As usual, the question remains—why does none of this seem to be priced in? I don’t know.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of €30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess an easy deploy story ?

Developer time is pretty costy and if you can save a lot of dev time a noticeable higher running cost can be well worth it for some companies (like smaller companies, startups which have still a fluent changing business model etc.). Through also it's not a fair compression because for the kind of services where being close to the edge and redundant over many places matters Hetzner isn't even an option. AWS maybe, but…

That's fair. Depending on budget, requirements and capabilities of the team something like fly.io can become a valid option.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Won't see a hint of region anywhere" is an exaggeration. Here's the Durable Objects documentation [1]. Don't those "location hints" look like regions? Also, here's the "Data location" page for Cloudflare D1 [2]. See "available hints" at the bottom. I think it would be more accurate to say that Cloudflare's architecture is designed around having lots of regions, automatic migrations between them, and no guarantee abo…

These are offered more as an escape hatch in case the system doesn't do what you want automatically. But the goal is definitely for the system to do what you want automatically, so that no one ever has to provide these hints. I actually argued against adding these hints at all, since it confuses the messaging and most people don't need them... but they were easy to add and solved an immediate problem for a few custom…

Thank you for the context and this is what I was getting at - if you really want to dig in on things like KV, D1 and DO you will see occasional mentions of regions (I'd really call it geography) to add context on things like "KV is eventually consistent, instant in the pop where the write takes place but takes X ms to propagate everywhere". For many (most?) applications it doesn't really matter, I get the sense for these you clearly document these things so people understand the more-or-less inescapable fundamental reasons why things are what they are. As other commenters have noted "there is no free lunch" when it comes to things like the physics of getting data from a pop in Tokyo to Chicago but Cloudflare does a good job and making it happen more-or-less invisible.
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