3 ms·

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative. (Genuine que

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative. (Genuine question, not being cynical).

jamie_ca 4y ago
The big one as a layman is they've invested in tooling for "edge" compute - similar to CloudFlare distributing your static assets worldwide for faster responses, Fly gives you the tools to do the same for your app servers. If you've got a worldwide audience you can set up your app in Dallas, Paris, Chennai, and Tokyo, have it auto-scale (and re-balance) instances based on which regions are the most in demand (eg, minimum 2 app servers per region, max 20 app servers, and it'll auto drift them throughout the day as needed). It also puts all your servers on a common VPN for communication, and they've got some tooling in place to help manage things like db replicas, replaying write requests back to the primary db env, etc. It's not necessarily trivial to port any old app over (if you're doing writes every request for logging etc, that's something you'd want to change up backgrounding the writes) but it really can make a huge impact in responsiveness once you're set up.
- noneeeed 4y ago
  That all sounds pretty cool. Nice to see people trying something new.
- 4khilles 4y ago
  I think their auto-scaling is somewhat broken currently. I set up auto-scaling with min=2 and max=6, and my VMs aren't scaling down from 3 to 2 even though there are 0 active connections on all the VMs.
dangets 4y ago
See the recent flurry of their sqlite replication blog posts: - https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/ https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/ - https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/ https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/ This allows for extremely cheap s3 database backups as well as fast local serving layer. And many more deep dives on their blog - https://fly.io/blog/ https://fly.io/blog/

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative. (Genuine question, not being cynical).

jamie_ca 4y ago

The big one as a layman is they've invested in tooling for "edge" compute - similar to CloudFlare distributing your static assets worldwide for faster responses, Fly gives you the tools to do the same for your app servers. If you've got a worldwide audience you can set up your app in Dallas, Paris, Chennai, and Tokyo, have it auto-scale (and re-balance) instances based on which regions are the most in demand (eg, minimum 2 app servers per region, max 20 app servers, and it'll auto drift them throughout the day as needed). It also puts all your servers on a common VPN for communication, and they've got some tooling in place to help manage things like db replicas, replaying write requests back to the primary db env, etc. It's not necessarily trivial to port any old app over (if you're doing writes every request for logging etc, that's something you'd want to change up backgrounding the writes) but it really can make a huge impact in responsiveness once you're set up.

noneeeed 4y ago
That all sounds pretty cool. Nice to see people trying something new.
4khilles 4y ago
I think their auto-scaling is somewhat broken currently. I set up auto-scaling with min=2 and max=6, and my VMs aren't scaling down from 3 to 2 even though there are 0 active connections on all the VMs.

dangets 4y ago

See the recent flurry of their sqlite replication blog posts: - https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/ https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/ - https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/ https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/ This allows for extremely cheap s3 database backups as well as fast local serving layer. And many more deep dives on their blog - https://fly.io/blog/ https://fly.io/blog/