6 ms·

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers

I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1. I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one off hand. What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl (and workflow) for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

latchkey 4y ago
> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles. Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    I'm not using gcp anymore because it's not worth risk losing access to my personal gmail account just to play around with pet projects. I might be paranoid, but I just don't feel comfortable when there's so much in play.
    - guhcampos 4y ago
      Create a new Gmail account?
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        Google associates different accounts that are from the same owner when handling issues FYI. So if they think your account is doing something wrong on GCP, be wary of associated accounts.
        latchkey 4y ago
        Never once heard of that.
        miyuru 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643
        latchkey 4y ago
        Did you read the comments? My takeaway is that it was bs.
        0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
        There was one person strongly challenging the story and plenty of back and forth. It hardly seems a settled case one way or the other.
      - namaria 4y ago
        Separating concerns, isolating things that are not related, these are some basic tenets of good engineering. Yet we all keep rolling the ball of mud downhill and act shocked it keeps growing and swallowing everything.
        latchkey 4y ago
        That's the beauty of the services I named. Super easy to roll the code to any other similar PaaS provider. There is no vendor lockin. It is postgres + http handlers.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      Totally agree with this mindset. My digital life is on the line because Google refuses to separate services.
  - amluto 4y ago
    Egress pricing, for one. fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that. At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo. For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps costs about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead. You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.
    - re-thc 4y ago
      It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.
      - amluto 4y ago
        The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud. This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on. (To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Depending on what I'm building, I tend to cache on the edge with something like CloudFlare in front of GCP. Lowers the egress charges significantly, with the benefit of speeding everything up too.
- mattbillenstein 4y ago
  Do you have a guide in mind? If it's sorting and sifting and clicking a bunch of stuff in the console, that's not painfully simple. If it's some easy cli commands, I think that's in the ballpark...
  - latchkey 4y ago
    There is a gcloud cli, but I just automated deployments in CI... https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functions https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functi...
cldellow 4y ago
Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.
- te_chris 4y ago
  Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now
  - jamil7 4y ago
    Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s a valid point.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    Unless a company is very explicit about this not being in the books, I tend to share this outlook. From the perspective of a recent founder, it's downright spooky to build around any SaaS, considering how few of them have been around for 10+ years, when that is certainly what our business is aiming for. I know (and share the feels): Devs tend to get excited about the new thing – but if Google Workspace shut down next month, we would be in so much operational trouble. When other peoples fancies stand in the way of the entire operation you are responsible for, it actually begs the question how much closed source SaaS you can allow before it starts to be quite frankly irresponsible. We are not imagining things. SaaS of all sizes shut down all the time, and when you are heavily relying on them and building software around them to run a business the prospect is spooky as hell.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      The difference between (free) Gmail and Google workspace is that workspace is a paid product. If you're big enough to warrant an AM, you can get terms which include continuity of business planning if Google does happen to shut down Workspace. (They won't.)
      - manmal 4y ago
manmal 4y ago
I can second that I‘ve seen render.com mentioned very often, maybe even more so than fly.
gen220 4y ago
> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dallas. Pardon the ignorance, is this not the Amplify CLI [1] ? [1]: https://docs.amplify.aws/cli/ https://docs.amplify.aws/cli/
- pid-1 4y ago
  No
  - scubbo 4y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    - ctvo 4y ago
      Things that just work and are delight to use and the AWS Amplify CLI are not often mentioned together. The Amplify CLI is a growing collection of poorly thought out, poorly implemented functionality that looks good in demos, but falls apart under any close inspection.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I can only assume that if you’ve ever used the amplify cli it makes total sense. At least that single ‘no’ contained a whole wealth of blood and tears to me.
    - nl 4y ago
      (No the OP) I like Amplify and use it often. However, it isn't well integrated with "normal" backends, so if you want to keep a backend and frontend deployed together you either have to use their Amplify backend API or work out your own deployment.
trunnell 4y ago
> Flyctl for AWS Have you tried AWS Copilot? I’m having good success with it. Probably not quite as simple as flyctl, but still it’s only one command to deploy a container. I would really like fly.io to overcome these hurdles. I bet they will.
zoomzoom 4y ago
I think this whole category is interesting, from the next-gen PaaS to the cloud-native ecosystem. Totally empathize with how hard what fly is doing in terms of scale and reliability is. At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we're focused on a developer experience layer on top of AWS/GCP. You might describe it as flyctl for AWS.

latchkey 4y ago

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles. Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  I'm not using gcp anymore because it's not worth risk losing access to my personal gmail account just to play around with pet projects. I might be paranoid, but I just don't feel comfortable when there's so much in play.
  - guhcampos 4y ago
    Create a new Gmail account?
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Google associates different accounts that are from the same owner when handling issues FYI. So if they think your account is doing something wrong on GCP, be wary of associated accounts.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        Never once heard of that.
        miyuru 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643
        latchkey 4y ago
        Did you read the comments? My takeaway is that it was bs.
        0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
        There was one person strongly challenging the story and plenty of back and forth. It hardly seems a settled case one way or the other.
    - namaria 4y ago
      Separating concerns, isolating things that are not related, these are some basic tenets of good engineering. Yet we all keep rolling the ball of mud downhill and act shocked it keeps growing and swallowing everything.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        That's the beauty of the services I named. Super easy to roll the code to any other similar PaaS provider. There is no vendor lockin. It is postgres + http handlers.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    Totally agree with this mindset. My digital life is on the line because Google refuses to separate services.
- amluto 4y ago
  Egress pricing, for one. fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that. At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo. For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps costs about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead. You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.
  - re-thc 4y ago
    It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.
    - amluto 4y ago
      The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud. This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on. (To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Depending on what I'm building, I tend to cache on the edge with something like CloudFlare in front of GCP. Lowers the egress charges significantly, with the benefit of speeding everything up too.
mattbillenstein 4y ago
Do you have a guide in mind? If it's sorting and sifting and clicking a bunch of stuff in the console, that's not painfully simple. If it's some easy cli commands, I think that's in the ballpark...
- latchkey 4y ago
  There is a gcloud cli, but I just automated deployments in CI... https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functions https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functi...

cldellow 4y ago

Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.

te_chris 4y ago
Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now
- jamil7 4y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s a valid point.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Unless a company is very explicit about this not being in the books, I tend to share this outlook. From the perspective of a recent founder, it's downright spooky to build around any SaaS, considering how few of them have been around for 10+ years, when that is certainly what our business is aiming for. I know (and share the feels): Devs tend to get excited about the new thing – but if Google Workspace shut down next month, we would be in so much operational trouble. When other peoples fancies stand in the way of the entire operation you are responsible for, it actually begs the question how much closed source SaaS you can allow before it starts to be quite frankly irresponsible. We are not imagining things. SaaS of all sizes shut down all the time, and when you are heavily relying on them and building software around them to run a business the prospect is spooky as hell.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    The difference between (free) Gmail and Google workspace is that workspace is a paid product. If you're big enough to warrant an AM, you can get terms which include continuity of business planning if Google does happen to shut down Workspace. (They won't.)
    - manmal 4y ago

manmal 4y ago

I can second that I‘ve seen render.com mentioned very often, maybe even more so than fly.

gen220 4y ago

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dallas. Pardon the ignorance, is this not the Amplify CLI [1] ? [1]: https://docs.amplify.aws/cli/ https://docs.amplify.aws/cli/

pid-1 4y ago
No
- scubbo 4y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - ctvo 4y ago
    Things that just work and are delight to use and the AWS Amplify CLI are not often mentioned together. The Amplify CLI is a growing collection of poorly thought out, poorly implemented functionality that looks good in demos, but falls apart under any close inspection.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I can only assume that if you’ve ever used the amplify cli it makes total sense. At least that single ‘no’ contained a whole wealth of blood and tears to me.
  - nl 4y ago
    (No the OP) I like Amplify and use it often. However, it isn't well integrated with "normal" backends, so if you want to keep a backend and frontend deployed together you either have to use their Amplify backend API or work out your own deployment.

trunnell 4y ago

> Flyctl for AWS Have you tried AWS Copilot? I’m having good success with it. Probably not quite as simple as flyctl, but still it’s only one command to deploy a container. I would really like fly.io to overcome these hurdles. I bet they will.

zoomzoom 4y ago

I think this whole category is interesting, from the next-gen PaaS to the cloud-native ecosystem. Totally empathize with how hard what fly is doing in terms of scale and reliability is. At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we're focused on a developer experience layer on top of AWS/GCP. You might describe it as flyctl for AWS.