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Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

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91–100 of 268 posts

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#91
We've been using fly.io for a month now. They are amazing. The service is great, the team is great, and most importantly our apps have seen a dramatic performance uplift by leveraging fly. A++ would use again.

Full disclosure: I am another YC founder. Fly did not ask me or encourage me to post this in any way.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#92
post #84

If one API request makes on average 5-10 round trips to the database, and the database is in Virginia, this only makes the problem (much) worse. How do you solve this problem for this use case?

We're not solving db latency yet. A good place to start is aggressively caching at the edge. We offer an in-memory redis cache for this that can replicate commands globally. Beyond that you'd need read replicas which will be possible once we launch persistent storage. That said, latency between data centers on the same continent is often less than I would have thought!

Gotcha, honestly that feels pretty niche to me, which might be a good place for a startup to start.

I can't think of many back-end applications between purely static content (just use a CDN) and needs a database connection. Probably video game servers, where you don't need the game state to be (immediately) stored/accessed globally.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#94
I'm so glad you've launched. I loved the entire thing every time you've explained it. Absolutely chuffed to see Wireguard and Firecracker getting deployed "in anger". Tensorflow@Edge sounds like the good kind of bananas to use it with.

Your quickstart being called speedrun is too good for you alone to have it, so I'm stealing it the next chance I get.

Either way congratulations Kurt & team! (and no I still have not bought that Safari 911 or any 911 for that matter and yes professional help is being sought).

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#96
post #64

What problem does it solve? Because latency is currently not an issue with all the regions from current cloud providers from my perspective. And for all static stuff you can use a CDN that has pop all arround the world / cities. Not sure I understand the use case of a single Docker image in a city outside of your entire backend services, especially the DB. If your Docker image talks to something else on AWS / GCP for…

This basically bumps the amount of behavior you can stuff into the edge by several orders of magnitude. Previously, Lambda@Edge will like, maybe validate a JWT. Now, you can put like half your app in there. It sounds like a tiny incremental change but it's big enough that it simply redefines what's even possible in a POP.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#97
post #88

Fascinating idea. I’d like gently to suggest that you make this your elevator pitch, since I don’t care about who you are. It’s pretty much what you said, but up at the top: “fly.io is really a way to run Docker images on servers in different cities and a global router to connect users to the nearest available instance. We convert your Docker image into a root filesystem, boot tiny VMs using an Amazon project called…

Agreed, that one sentence line is perfect and not fully clear on the website. A lot of these cloud services keep it quite vague for some reason, which I somewhat understand for the whole 'CTO marketing'. But the early adopters will appreciate it and they are who matter the most early on.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#99
This sounds great.

How suitable do you think this is for CPU-intensive work? I'm interested in having servers for scientific-computational work, which would be rather CPU-heavy. It would be great to offload some of this to a nearby browser for bits and pieces that desire low-latency.

Re: Launch HN: Fly.io (YC W20) – Deploy app servers close to your users

#100
The max monthly spend is awesome, I'l probably try it out just because of that :) Its a bit unclear to me though how exactly the heroku deploy works? Is it basically a replacement for the web dynos that heroku provides, but then still connecting to existing postgres instances for example? What are the limits for the redis store? I'm using it on heroku but constantly running into max connection issues, if you can improve that experience it is also a great win.
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