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Sounds great. When I think about using this, the main question that comes to mind is about the scale and scope of your infrastructure, compared to Cloudflare,

Sounds great. When I think about using this, the main question that comes to mind is about the scale and scope of your infrastructure, compared to Cloudflare, for example, which recently came out with a way to run JavaScript at the edge, and has more "edge chops," as a company, than I could ever ask for. I say this having started a YC company that advertised "scalable" hosted apps, but planned to deal with the actual scaling as it came up. With start-ups, you never know when you are just using an MVP, you know? This is a new enough type of thing (edge apps) that it's not going to become a commodity overnight, but it seems like the kind of business where, once there's competition, small customers will care about developer experience, but larger customers will care more about price and performance. This is the problem with "easy-to-use" developer tools and services; customers with money can burn a few extra developer hours getting a more complicated service configured. All that said, Fly sounds legit and innovative. :)

mrkurt 9y ago
Oh definitely, we have a huge credibility grind to get through. We have the benefit of a successful exit doing hosted DBs at scale, at least, and I'm not sure I ever would have jumped into something like this otherwise. It's big hairy infrastructure, and really expensive to even get started. For bigger companies, one of my pet theories is that they're going to want to run private edges. Shared infrastructure at every other level is passé, the trend is really to "own" the OS on up. This is part of why our runtime is open source, it's a reasonably good way to get into bigger companies thinking about these problems that don't want to be exposed in the next "bleed" event. We're running in 15 datacenters at the moment which is (a) way more than most companies can manage and (b) not nearly as many as Fastly/Akamai/CloudFlare/*CDN. So I think we're in a good spot to win devs and startups over. And again, open source. We all love our OSS runtimes. :D (note: I was a tremendous Etherpad fanboy)
- dgreensp 9y ago
  Interesting to hear! Thanks for the EtherPad love. (I'm finally working on my next app!) There's something a bit AppJet-like about Fly. I also really think this model could be the future; do you even need an "application server" if you have Fly and a datastore? I'm really looking forward to what you come up with for persistence. At AppJet, we had something called "magic storage" where you could access the "database" via proxy objects, with no explicit database calls. I wouldn't do it quite the same way now, but I can imagine some really neat JS persistence APIs that strip away the usual impedance mismatches between application logic and database, especially if the data is "right there" at the edge.

mrkurt 9y ago

Oh definitely, we have a huge credibility grind to get through. We have the benefit of a successful exit doing hosted DBs at scale, at least, and I'm not sure I ever would have jumped into something like this otherwise. It's big hairy infrastructure, and really expensive to even get started. For bigger companies, one of my pet theories is that they're going to want to run private edges. Shared infrastructure at every other level is passé, the trend is really to "own" the OS on up. This is part of why our runtime is open source, it's a reasonably good way to get into bigger companies thinking about these problems that don't want to be exposed in the next "bleed" event. We're running in 15 datacenters at the moment which is (a) way more than most companies can manage and (b) not nearly as many as Fastly/Akamai/CloudFlare/*CDN. So I think we're in a good spot to win devs and startups over. And again, open source. We all love our OSS runtimes. :D (note: I was a tremendous Etherpad fanboy)

dgreensp 9y ago
Interesting to hear! Thanks for the EtherPad love. (I'm finally working on my next app!) There's something a bit AppJet-like about Fly. I also really think this model could be the future; do you even need an "application server" if you have Fly and a datastore? I'm really looking forward to what you come up with for persistence. At AppJet, we had something called "magic storage" where you could access the "database" via proxy objects, with no explicit database calls. I wouldn't do it quite the same way now, but I can imagine some really neat JS persistence APIs that strip away the usual impedance mismatches between application logic and database, especially if the data is "right there" at the edge.