4 ms·

Sounds like a huge red flag to me then, and loses my confidence that this service is reliable, plus it makes it a hard decision for most (even me) to go with th

Sounds like a huge red flag to me then, and loses my confidence that this service is reliable, plus it makes it a hard decision for most (even me) to go with them. It also signals to me it is not battle tested and results in lost sales. I'll find someone else.

atonse 6y ago
I tend to invest in people and the people behind this seem really solid, and they’ve been remarkably open about their stack and how things are built. It all seems very well engineered. I worry more about them getting acquired quickly (which is deserved for them but not so much for their customers)
- mrkurt 6y ago
  I'm one of those weird people who thinks the world would be better if acquisitions didn't happen. Some of my best work is gone from the internet because a large company acquired it and let it rot.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Could you clarify what you mean by "I invest in people"? I found it quite fascinating but I might be misinterpreting or projecting. Is it "I invest in people with sound business ideas", or "I invest in people whose approach has historically shown their company will do well", or is it something else?
  - atonse 6y ago
    I just mean that rather than just seek out technologies for the sake of technologies, I seek out people that I respect and see what they're tinkering with, or what they've built, and how they arrived at solutions to many of the problems that most of us face. There are certain people whose skills and judgement I respect, that I feel I know well enough about how they reason about things (as well as you can know following them on the internet), that if they're saying this thing is good, I trust that. One example is Yehuda Katz, who was a ruby on rails and jQuery core dev team member, now spends most of his time on Ember.js. I may not always agree with him (although it's rare) but I have found that his approach to engineering is just really well-rounded and well-reasoned. So you can totally see how he arrived at his conclusions. Like why to even put time into working on something like Ember.js, rather than joining yet another core team. Another set of folks are the Hashicorp founders – over the years their approach to the industry and how they build out their solutions has really resonated with me. So I tend to trust just about anything they build. Similarly, I feel someone like tptacek isn't just a security nerd but is able to articulate where the importance of security fits in with an org, with users, with businesses, with tradeoffs, etc etc etc, and seems to have a clarity in communication that I admire. Similarly, the fact that they are able to so confidently explain every aspect of their stack shows that not only are they proud of what they've accomplished, that they don't feel this is going to hurt them competitively. And the more I read about the stack, the more I keep nodding my head and just smiling at the sheer elegance in how they built it out. And I am actually someone who never really got on the Heroku bandwagon. It just never felt right. So I'm looking forward to really trying it out.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      And now I am sad because I've never met a person like you, even if many other people told me that I am exactly such a kind of guy -- a tinkerer and a critical thinker who rejects some of the status quo and is seeing it as the bad mess that it is and doesn't pretend otherwise. I completely agree about Hashicorp btw. They are for me one perfect embodiment of the philosophy you outlined: they challenge the current preconceived notions and are severely pushing back against too much complexity. Same for clarity in communication. Thinking about it, in my 19.5 years of career, I spent the last 3-4 much more in improving my articulation than improving my programming. The latter kind of started happening automatically due to the former. Felt quite pleasantly surprised by that. So, thank you for existing, really. The world needs more people like you.
dspillett 6y ago
> Sounds like a huge red flag to me then, and loses my confidence that this service is reliable Some of our clients have policy that states they won't let themselves be used as a reference site under any circumstances. That includes us mentioning them in promotional literature, except if they specifically agree to (or suggest) some sort of cross-promotion opportunity.
- Hallucinaut 6y ago
  Not even just "some" clients for us, but nearly all. Any major "traditional" corporation or public body is not going to let you market or promote generally without giving a huge amount away. Very occasionally they won't argue our default terms for software but will prevent it in a separate NDA. In my experience almost all references to big corporations are being done according to the "ask for forgiveness not permission" principle. So in GP's comment these companies you could also argue are flying closer to the sun according to law.
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    This is how it works for us. When we hire a marketing group, we'll work through the process, do case studies, etc. But it's more fun to write technical content.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  All that is understood. The big question after the article was - the how is delved into so much detail.. but the why seems a little hazy. Is it just security that your customers want? What is the primary motivation of doing this? Your raison d'etre mentioned somewhere would be cool.. Edit: from their website "Deploy App Servers Close to Your Users Run your full stack apps (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required."
  - tptacek 6y ago
    I think the thing you're looking for is subtextual. A thing you may not have noticed about serious hosting providers is that none of them run general-purpose container workloads in multitenant Docker. You have to do something like we're doing to host Docker containers for multiple organizations. Docker itself --- shared Linux kernels --- simply aren't isolated enough to protect customers from each other. So: what we're describing isn't some breakthrough in hosting technology --- we're literally shoplifting the engine Amazon wrote to do the same thing --- but rather just explaining how we put these pieces together for our own product. If I wanted to talk about things that were unique to Fly, I'd talk about our Anycast CDN and the way it automatically plugs into Fly apps, so that they are, out of the box, globally connected. Or about how we manage certificates, which we (I had nothing to do with it) apparently nailed the UX for so well that people use us just for that. But that wasn't the point of this post; it really was just an effort to talk through some of the technical decisions we made.
mrkurt 6y ago
You're getting downvoted but I don't think that's fair. Some people want social proof, we're not going to get them as customers. There's a reason "no one ever got fired for buying AWS". I will say that most of our technical choices are informed, and even forced, by customer workloads. Almost everything we've built is the result of "battle". Even this post – the change to containerd + devicemapper was the result of running a tremendous number of apps AND customers with 8GB+ images who wanted fast deploys. For some people, the technical detail gives them enough confidence to try it out. And we're totally ok just attracting those people as customers right now.

atonse 6y ago

I tend to invest in people and the people behind this seem really solid, and they’ve been remarkably open about their stack and how things are built. It all seems very well engineered. I worry more about them getting acquired quickly (which is deserved for them but not so much for their customers)

mrkurt 6y ago
I'm one of those weird people who thinks the world would be better if acquisitions didn't happen. Some of my best work is gone from the internet because a large company acquired it and let it rot.
pdimitar 6y ago
Could you clarify what you mean by "I invest in people"? I found it quite fascinating but I might be misinterpreting or projecting. Is it "I invest in people with sound business ideas", or "I invest in people whose approach has historically shown their company will do well", or is it something else?
- atonse 6y ago
  I just mean that rather than just seek out technologies for the sake of technologies, I seek out people that I respect and see what they're tinkering with, or what they've built, and how they arrived at solutions to many of the problems that most of us face. There are certain people whose skills and judgement I respect, that I feel I know well enough about how they reason about things (as well as you can know following them on the internet), that if they're saying this thing is good, I trust that. One example is Yehuda Katz, who was a ruby on rails and jQuery core dev team member, now spends most of his time on Ember.js. I may not always agree with him (although it's rare) but I have found that his approach to engineering is just really well-rounded and well-reasoned. So you can totally see how he arrived at his conclusions. Like why to even put time into working on something like Ember.js, rather than joining yet another core team. Another set of folks are the Hashicorp founders – over the years their approach to the industry and how they build out their solutions has really resonated with me. So I tend to trust just about anything they build. Similarly, I feel someone like tptacek isn't just a security nerd but is able to articulate where the importance of security fits in with an org, with users, with businesses, with tradeoffs, etc etc etc, and seems to have a clarity in communication that I admire. Similarly, the fact that they are able to so confidently explain every aspect of their stack shows that not only are they proud of what they've accomplished, that they don't feel this is going to hurt them competitively. And the more I read about the stack, the more I keep nodding my head and just smiling at the sheer elegance in how they built it out. And I am actually someone who never really got on the Heroku bandwagon. It just never felt right. So I'm looking forward to really trying it out.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    And now I am sad because I've never met a person like you, even if many other people told me that I am exactly such a kind of guy -- a tinkerer and a critical thinker who rejects some of the status quo and is seeing it as the bad mess that it is and doesn't pretend otherwise. I completely agree about Hashicorp btw. They are for me one perfect embodiment of the philosophy you outlined: they challenge the current preconceived notions and are severely pushing back against too much complexity. Same for clarity in communication. Thinking about it, in my 19.5 years of career, I spent the last 3-4 much more in improving my articulation than improving my programming. The latter kind of started happening automatically due to the former. Felt quite pleasantly surprised by that. So, thank you for existing, really. The world needs more people like you.

dspillett 6y ago

> Sounds like a huge red flag to me then, and loses my confidence that this service is reliable Some of our clients have policy that states they won't let themselves be used as a reference site under any circumstances. That includes us mentioning them in promotional literature, except if they specifically agree to (or suggest) some sort of cross-promotion opportunity.

Hallucinaut 6y ago
Not even just "some" clients for us, but nearly all. Any major "traditional" corporation or public body is not going to let you market or promote generally without giving a huge amount away. Very occasionally they won't argue our default terms for software but will prevent it in a separate NDA. In my experience almost all references to big corporations are being done according to the "ask for forgiveness not permission" principle. So in GP's comment these companies you could also argue are flying closer to the sun according to law.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  This is how it works for us. When we hire a marketing group, we'll work through the process, do case studies, etc. But it's more fun to write technical content.
dmingod666 6y ago
All that is understood. The big question after the article was - the how is delved into so much detail.. but the why seems a little hazy. Is it just security that your customers want? What is the primary motivation of doing this? Your raison d'etre mentioned somewhere would be cool.. Edit: from their website "Deploy App Servers Close to Your Users Run your full stack apps (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required."
- tptacek 6y ago
  I think the thing you're looking for is subtextual. A thing you may not have noticed about serious hosting providers is that none of them run general-purpose container workloads in multitenant Docker. You have to do something like we're doing to host Docker containers for multiple organizations. Docker itself --- shared Linux kernels --- simply aren't isolated enough to protect customers from each other. So: what we're describing isn't some breakthrough in hosting technology --- we're literally shoplifting the engine Amazon wrote to do the same thing --- but rather just explaining how we put these pieces together for our own product. If I wanted to talk about things that were unique to Fly, I'd talk about our Anycast CDN and the way it automatically plugs into Fly apps, so that they are, out of the box, globally connected. Or about how we manage certificates, which we (I had nothing to do with it) apparently nailed the UX for so well that people use us just for that. But that wasn't the point of this post; it really was just an effort to talk through some of the technical decisions we made.

mrkurt 6y ago

You're getting downvoted but I don't think that's fair. Some people want social proof, we're not going to get them as customers. There's a reason "no one ever got fired for buying AWS". I will say that most of our technical choices are informed, and even forced, by customer workloads. Almost everything we've built is the result of "battle". Even this post – the change to containerd + devicemapper was the result of running a tremendous number of apps AND customers with 8GB+ images who wanted fast deploys. For some people, the technical detail gives them enough confidence to try it out. And we're totally ok just attracting those people as customers right now.