Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
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Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
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Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#2> The main motivation to migrate was cost.
Is Fly.io really than much cheaper for hosting CDN/Postgres/Docker Container?
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#3> The main motivation to migrate was cost. Is Fly.io really than much cheaper for hosting CDN/Postgres/Docker Container?
We saved about 50% of our monthly bill migrating from AWS to Fly.io. While Fly.io isn't cheap, it's certainly cheaper than AWS from my experience.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#4No 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 — AWS in this case — and more to do with the application itself that's being deployed. Most recently, we were able to shave off 50% of a client's bill that was using Lambda for compute. The issue? Several, including sleep timers (on a service where you pay by the millisecond!) as well as pathological code (i.e. consume message from queue, enqueue same message, rinse and repeat).
Yes. You can save money by transitioning to another provider. But I'd start with reviewing the underlying code and architecture first
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#5> 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
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#6The 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 to the fly wire guard VPN. But obviously, there’s no guarantee that the latency will always be that good.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#7No 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.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#8I missed when this was added:
> if you configure your application to expose a Prometheus endpoint, those metrics will automatically show up on your Grafana dashboard
But that's such an amazing and simple idea to integrate observability. Love the approach.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#9The 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…
> But obviously, there’s no guarantee that the latency will always be that good
That guarantee already doesn't exist with RDS. The RDS master is in one AZ, your server may be in another (and if it isn't, well, RDS will fail over to another AZ eventually). The network latency between AWS AZs is usually good, but it can be arbitrarily high, up to full outages between AZs.
This is just a measure of degrees. Your application and/or business already has to handle some degree of network issues (aws network outages), so it's a tradeoff of whether the extra hops increase the chance enough to matter.
Re: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
#10> The main motivation to migrate was cost. Is Fly.io really than much cheaper for hosting CDN/Postgres/Docker Container?
I moved a service that was costing me $300+/mo to Fly and this month it was like $15. Some months I fall under the minimum $5 billing threshold and it is just free.
They are the only provider that has nailed the killer feature: turn off shit while it isn't in use.