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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

#51

Post by maliker »

I’ve used fly.io for a couple new projects. The main thing I like about it is that it supports affordable and easy to use persistent volumes, something the container services (GCP, AWS) don’t. This lets me test locally with volumes in a way that is identical to how things will work when deployed. With the other container hosts, I’ve had to refactor to use cloud storage services like S3.

Fly.io also has a clean, highly usable CLI and minimal set of services unlike the hundreds of options on other providers. But that’s just icing on top—the volume support is the big advantage for me.

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

#52

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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.

This isn't quite the same thing as trying to scale like Google though. Low latency is very important for usability regardless of how many users you serve. How easy it is to achieve depends more on the geographical distribution of your users than on their number.

If my app has a handful of users that are split between the US and Europe or Asia, and the app is 90% reads, then the distributed DB approach of fly.io or Cloudflare makes a lot of sense. It also adds considerable complexity though, so it's obviously a tradeoff.

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

#53

Post by a-dub »

ghoomketu wrote: post #6
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?

As per dang's comment a few days back(1) > I wish more startups would achieve this, YC or not. Whenever I run across one that's trying to succeed on HN, I try to help them do so (YC or not)—why? because it makes HN better if the community finds things it loves here. Among the startups of today, I can think of only two offhand who are showing signs of maybe reaching darling status—fly.io (YC), and Tailscale (not YC).…

litestream looks super solid. would definitely consider it for a new project, if appropriate.

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

#55

Post by ellen364 »

rkangel wrote: post #42

I think his stack is a little confused. He's got HTMX and Phoenix in there. If you are using Phoenix then LiveView is the obvious approach to dynamically updating a page based on server stuff. It's a similar-ish architecture to HTMX, but integrated into the framework. The page is rendered on the server as normal, then when it loads on the client a web-socket is opened to a task on the server (page includes the LiveVi…

From the article, I’m not sure if the author is using all of Phoenix + HTMX + alpine.js or just exploring the combos to see what works.

I recently started playing with Phoenix and the intro to channels and LiveView has been a bit confusing. E.g. a few days ago I wondered if it was worth using something like Svelte for the frontend and then realised I could just use LiveView. As a newbie to the ecosystem, it’s taking a while to get the lay of the land and start understanding the options.

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

#56

Post by manigandham »

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?

Almost none.

I've built 3 adtech companies including all the tech and it's one of the few cases where data needs to be spread across global regions for latency and regulations. It's a lot of effort regardless of the underlying provider and not worth it unless you really have the scale and latency requirements.

You can receive an HTTP response from the other side of the planet in less than a second so server-side rendering and sending a single HTML page works just fine. The problem is actually all these client-side SPAs that make a dozen requests and are actually much slower because of it.

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

#57

Post by Multicomp »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #22
telotortium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, fly.io has as a principal tptacek, who's at the top of the HN leaderboard and so has built up a lot of goodwill here.

This actually makes me wonder if people here generally pay attention, who posted what? Does that influence actual upvote status? I never look at the person name when replying or voting, only the content. For example, I remembered this tptacek not because I remembered his posts, but because they get frequently mentioned in other people posts.

> Does that influence actual upvote status?

It didn't for me. I also don't look at who posted links. But fly.io is leaning into a concept I want to use and want to become more of a thing, and that's using SQLite for more web scale applications. Because there's web scale of Google and there's web scale of the rest of us, and I'm sick of paying the operational overhead of having a full database cluster when the app doesn't utilize its features any more than it would a SQLite db.

But in the past everyone turned their nose up at SQLite because they were cool and you were dirty and gross if you wanted to simplify things.

Don't you know we just need horizontal scaling because any second now we're going to get more than 10 write requests per second?

But fly.io leaning into litestream for replicating those databases is a thumbs up to using simple boring technology (SQLite), while still getting 80% of the benefits of doing containers hosted in a cloud platform.

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

#59

Post by danjac »

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?

It's related to all the negative press recently around Heroku (security concerns + Salesforce neglect). People had a lot of goodwill towards the Paas, and a lot of that is missing what a PaaS does for you in the current environment of AWS or k8s complexity around devops, so they are looking for a replacement, and fly.io looks like one of the more innovative, or at least well-marketed, in this space.

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

#60

Post by jacobr1 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #34
CJefferson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I regularly notice that when I read an HN-linked article that has a some solid links, maybe even sending me down a rabbit-hole of related pages on a new topic, when I resurface and return to HN I find a few a of those related page on HN themselves.
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