8 ms·

Cloud Run is an alternative to fly.io that scales to zero so it can be much cheaper but with added cold starts.

bobnamob 4y ago
Isn’t the whole appeal of fly that they’re geolocated near your users, reducing latency so you can use fancy serverside rendering stacks like Phoenix? Cold start latency kinda ruins that no?
- aenis 4y ago
  Latency on cloud run is not an issue, in my experience (been using it around 4 years now, on a fairly large scale). Its generally fast as is, and if you want to pre-allocate a minimum # of instances, cold starts are less of a problem (basically only if you are suddenly stampeded by a spike in traffic). But the whole smart routing and localized storage concepts are left for you to implement. You can have a bunch of cloud run services behind an ELB that does geo-proximity based routing but firestore is region-bound, and cloud spanner can be very expensive. Not saying there are no workarounds but it seems to me fly.io offers a much lower cost of entry here.
- tlarkworthy 4y ago
  No cloud Run instance supports 1000 concurrent users and stays active for 15 min after no traffic, so only a small subset of users should ever hit a cold start.
aenis 4y ago
But, to get a cloud run based setup: - you need an elb - and this is not cheap (if you have an efficient backend, the elb will dwarf compute costs) - no persistent volumes, and you are encouraged to use gcs or firestore - each region requires a new deployment. No big deal but certainly not super easy to automate, esp. given the need to run behind an ELB (which you need on gcp to have a WAF) - google sdks for some languages suck big time. Most of python sdk is not async friendly, unbelievable as it seems. I do use cloud run for projects big and small, and rather like it, but its hardly a competitor to fly.io imho.
- tlarkworthy 4y ago
  Yeah the load balancer bit sucks, I forgot about that. I use terraform for multi region deploys but yeah, the load balancer is a major cost.

Isn’t the whole appeal of fly that they’re geolocated near your users, reducing latency so you can use fancy serverside rendering stacks like Phoenix? Cold start latency kinda ruins that no?

aenis 4y ago
Latency on cloud run is not an issue, in my experience (been using it around 4 years now, on a fairly large scale). Its generally fast as is, and if you want to pre-allocate a minimum # of instances, cold starts are less of a problem (basically only if you are suddenly stampeded by a spike in traffic). But the whole smart routing and localized storage concepts are left for you to implement. You can have a bunch of cloud run services behind an ELB that does geo-proximity based routing but firestore is region-bound, and cloud spanner can be very expensive. Not saying there are no workarounds but it seems to me fly.io offers a much lower cost of entry here.
tlarkworthy 4y ago
No cloud Run instance supports 1000 concurrent users and stays active for 15 min after no traffic, so only a small subset of users should ever hit a cold start.

aenis 4y ago

But, to get a cloud run based setup: - you need an elb - and this is not cheap (if you have an efficient backend, the elb will dwarf compute costs) - no persistent volumes, and you are encouraged to use gcs or firestore - each region requires a new deployment. No big deal but certainly not super easy to automate, esp. given the need to run behind an ELB (which you need on gcp to have a WAF) - google sdks for some languages suck big time. Most of python sdk is not async friendly, unbelievable as it seems. I do use cloud run for projects big and small, and rather like it, but its hardly a competitor to fly.io imho.

tlarkworthy 4y ago
Yeah the load balancer bit sucks, I forgot about that. I use terraform for multi region deploys but yeah, the load balancer is a major cost.