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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 th

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.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Honestly though, what you said did entice me to start reading the article so there's also that. :) It's OK to have a little more background before the start of the article. It's a technical audience, they'll not just take it but as you can see, some will actively ask for it.

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.

pdimitar 6y ago
Honestly though, what you said did entice me to start reading the article so there's also that. :) It's OK to have a little more background before the start of the article. It's a technical audience, they'll not just take it but as you can see, some will actively ask for it.