27 ms·

We raised a bunch of money

643 points by charliermarsh 3y ago

geraldwhen 3y ago
“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts
- buf 3y ago
  I'm at least 50 of them
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?
  - SonOfLilit 3y ago
    In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have significant representation in local politics. In this specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to public service.
    - titanomachy 3y ago
      This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
      - SonOfLilit 3y ago
        Honestly the question felt very Llama in the sense that it didn't really pass my Turing test, so I couldn't really answer it in a way that didn't feel robotic.
  - dswalter 3y ago
    The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
    - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
      EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board! Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.
      - jeremyjh 3y ago
        Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.
  - afterburner 3y ago
    Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).
  - arandr0x 3y ago
    In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth to it after September 2021.
- sneak 3y ago
  How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    It's great, and it shows in their docs also. Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
    - TheFlyingFish 3y ago
      Oh man, early Slack was great. Back in ~2015 or so I submitted a ticket about something trivial (why I could no longer hide the menubar or something, I forget), but just for fun I did it all in stilted archaic language like you'd see in the 1600s or something. "Behold, in days of yore when the Users of the Land sought refuge from the tiresome typing that had so bedeviled their lives hitherto..." etc. Anyway, their CS team responded in kind. Hands-down the most fun I've ever had with a support ticket.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Does VC like snarky? Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product. In a corpo it's sleazy
  - jeremy_k 3y ago
    I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?
    - swyx 3y ago
      theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
    - 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
        culi 3y ago
        Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc. I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends. When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.
    - kkielhofner 3y ago
      Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".
- jonluca 3y ago
  This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet
  - mrkurt 3y ago
    This effect is bananas. The internet feels remarkably different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.
- awkward 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he could have still made a joke without making it up.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    We got this off the Loudoun County website! We do our research for these things!
    - margalabargala 3y ago
      While "where tradition meets innovation" is a set of words that the county puts on their logo, and appears to meet the definition of a motto, the parent is correct that the Official Motto is indeed "I Byde My Time". https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms "Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official motto. https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563 https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
      - tptacek 3y ago
        People wonder why I'm so addicted to this site, but I mean, it's obvious right here, isn't it?
buf 3y ago
Having grown up on Heroku, it's such a breath of fresh air to see companies innovating in this space. Render, Fly are the big ones, but even little one-man shops like Hatchbox are good enough to deploy medium-scale production apps. Kudos to these companies, the VCs, and the beta testers.
techn00 3y ago
Does fly use Equinox or something similar for their hardware?
- mrkurt 3y ago
  We use Equinix Metal / Packet in some places, our own hardware + colo in others, and something close to colo/hardware in more.
yolo3000 3y ago
So if the bookstore doesn't think it's worth it to spend more than 2 hours on deploying to the edge, maybe it's not that important to them, or :) ?
- phaer 3y ago
  I think fly.io believes that they can allow the bookstore to do so in less than two hours for a price where it's still important enough for the bookstore and profitable - in aggregate - for fly.io. I personally believe that could be true, but their investors going to find out ;)
  - yolo3000 3y ago
    So change your infra to save a few hours :D I guess they have other compelling features.
    - benzible 3y ago
      Tell me you've never without telling me etc...
  - mrkurt 3y ago
    Roughly this, yes. It's easy to run boring apps close to your users. Thus, people buy computer time from us instead of a place that runs in one city.
    - davnicwil 3y ago
      I've long suspected this is what you guys would end up focusing on (and applaud it) -almost like an OS for edge compute that abstracts away its details while allowing boring architectures built for single-point to 'just run' on it. But is there a limit to how boring you can go? Can you truly, fully abstract over distributed systems stuff like eventual consistency and its basically random effects on UX in certain usage edge cases? Or do you think 'boring' will have to meet you in the middle with frameworks and developer mindset also shifting over time to a more edge-first world?
kayodelycaon 3y ago
> What people actually wanted to talk about, though? Databases. And they completely avoid discussing it again in this article. It would be nice if I could know what their product is for because it doesn't seem to be the apps I work on.
- dementik 3y ago
  I presume they start discussing about it when LiteFS is matured enough.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  This is a "raised money" post. So presumably they raised money so they can have a database answer in the future.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people, and the platform strategy is to build durable storage primitives that work for as many different databases as possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.
    - tylergetsay 3y ago
      Do you have any info about how edge deployments + sqlite work and what kind of applications they are limited to?
      - mrkurt 3y ago
        Basically, LiteFS: https://github.com/superfly/litefs https://github.com/superfly/litefs And then some load balancer cleverness that reroutes writes to a specific VM: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/ https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/
        3y ago
h1fra 3y ago
Congrats! I love Fly.io, used it for side projects and I was very pleased with the UX and the free tier. The blog post is funny but the style is a bit excruciating to read.
xianshou 3y ago
Self-aware commentary like this only works if used sparingly, but this one is extremely effective - acknowledges the mercenary motivations, implicit hypocrisy, and self-aggrandization of such announcements while nonetheless communicating all the important information and succinctly breaking down a real problem that their platform solves. On top of that, the legitimate uses of funding are clearly identified, answering any questions about both "why" and "how much". Cheers, guys.
- brabel 3y ago
  I loved it. They stayed as far away as possible for your traditional grandiose, jargon-filled, corporate speak we normally get in these announcenments. They definitely gained a few points with me :).
yieldcrv 3y ago
so I'm guessing Vercel and Netlify deploy cloud functions only to the "least worst datacenter"? while Fly.io deploys compute instances to more regions and also has a database? asking because I've been content with Vercel and Netlify's CDN for frontend assets and simply stopped doing system design around relational storage, when I want to stay on a free tier.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We're a full stack platform, most frequently compared to Heroku --- a place you'd run a Rails, Elixir, or Django app.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings? Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Vercel (for instance) does pure serverless --- you configure "functions" that are invoked by their orchestrator --- that are all Javascript, or compiled to JS/WASM. Fly.io takes Docker containers, turns them into VMs, and lets you decide where and when to have them running. One isn't better than the other; they're just totally different models for hosting applications. The Fly.io model is much closer to what Heroku did, just modernized (with Docker, edge deployments, the `fly-proxy`, etc).
- PKop 3y ago
  More languages is the bigger difference... also not just cloud functions but full servers.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
h_mirin 3y ago
I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku. I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  This is the biggest draw for me. I don't have a need for Fly at the moment, like I have not needed Heroku most of the time, but its got strong mindshare for me. Heroku was basically great, and apart from not quite keeping up with modern practices and having recent outages, it's still otherwise a great UX. Fly feels like that but updated for the modern age.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system. Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a continual set of asterisks.. but i'm probably being unfair and PTSD'y. Think i should give Fly a look? I at least find their SQLite features super interesting
  - mrkurt 3y ago
    A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some months are better than others). Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each. Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      Does Fly handle price caps? Ie to setup pricing to replicate ~$5/m behavior. Helping to ensure i can't use up all my ~$5/m budget in a few days of traffic, but i also can't go over some specified cap. If so i'll probably give it a try! edit: Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i can keep pricing similar. Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah. edit2: Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit and a subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month. Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money. [1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-month/714/6 https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...
lawrencechen 3y ago
> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript. Playful jab on Cloudflare and Deno. Would be interesting if Fly took up hosting "WASM containers" in addition to Docker containers.
- Havoc 3y ago
  Cloudflare works are/can be wasm too btw
- ignoramous 3y ago
  That's a jab at wasmer, fermyon et al (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508077), me thinks. I think, the jab on Cloudflare was the "get a salesperson to call" part.
OriginalMrPink 3y ago
The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing burger.
- berkle4455 3y ago
  A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty noteworthy to me. That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/ https://fly.io/jobs/.
  - OriginalMrPink 3y ago
    I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific what I don't like about their communication. "$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time. "There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb." I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.
    - comice 3y ago
      > We’re all adults here, we can talk about this stuff, right? proceeds to not really talk about it
      - tptacek 3y ago
        What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as a customer.
        comice 3y ago
secondcoming 3y ago
Wow, it took a really long time to get to what this company claims to do. Spinning up VMs. It's not difficult to do this on AWS or GCP.
joshcanhelp 3y ago
A but if a side note but … their jobs page is pretty great. Nothing available but they already have very specific and interesting descriptions written for all the positions they have or expect to have. Feels like they are being very mindful about the company they are building.
examplary_cable 3y ago
I'm currently using fly.io and I have no complains so far(most of the problems I had were my fault like a DNS/IP/Certification problem).
Scarbutt 3y ago
Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.
- reeaper 3y ago
  I did have my postgresql DB on their service randomly stop once and didn't restart until I logged in and poked it :(
- buf 3y ago
  I also don't use fly (yet) because of technical issues they have. They are in a really messy state at the moment. Nevertheless, I'm excited for them and continue to cheer them on until they mature.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  Running (diskless) production workloads on Fly.io since 2021 (300+ req/sec across 30+ regions). Sure you ran into problems almost every month back then, but not anymore. Not in my experience.
fishtoaster 3y ago
"Why do startups write announcements like these?" I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read tech press. There's nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I'm just surprised they acknowledged mercenary reasons without mentioning what I've seen as the most common one.
- eduction 3y ago
  Saying it's "for press" just kicks the can down the road, raising the question "why do startups want press on announcements like these?" They do it to get out a certain message and leave a certain impression, usually of the mercenary sort the post outlines. Although I see your point about it just being to get the name of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary motivation that the post maybe did not mention.
  - bearjaws 3y ago
    The math is pretty straight forward. Cost to make article = $2000 Article gets 100,000 views Fly.io converts 1% of views to paying customers 1,000 new customers. Revenue per customer = $10 monthly MRR goes up by $10,000 Obviously I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, but there a pretty direct path to value. This is way more efficient than Google ads in a competitive space, I can only imagine hosting related ads are $3-5 per click...
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      That math works for any old blog post. Advertising a raise specifically is to get attention from customers and the industry as a legitimized successful operation.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        At the very least, it's marketing. I have no idea what they do, as I'm not in that particular web development niche and don't know what an "edgy app" is, but it made it to the top of HN, so people like me now know at least that there exists a company called fly.io.
mattmaroon 3y ago
One of the best-written press releases I’ve seen for sure.
catchnear4321 3y ago
> Our first reason is obvious, and mercenary. even though there’s a reason (or three) behind the style of the post, including the use of transparency, it is refreshing.
cvwright 3y ago
> There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the margins work. Amen to that. Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it. But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"
- mrkurt 3y ago
  They should, probably. We have partner-like customers who are paying actual hardware costs and then a platform fee for us to manage it. You can only build so many company margins on top of capital expenditures.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  I don't think there's enough expertise in running hardware out there, frankly. For a company where running hardware isn't their bread and butter finding and hiring people who can do it, and do it well, is existentially risky. It is hard enough to find people who can properly run on a PaaS.
gizmo 3y ago
Okay so they raised 100m which means they need to work towards a 1bn exit. And if they want to keep their momentum going their r&d cost will go through the roof. Because they have to build the whole stack and it all has to be rock solid (eventually). It’s an immense engineering effort. I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real expense is r&d, marketing and SBC and those will rule out profitability at any scale. These are not one-time expenses. You have to keep spending forever or your customers will leave. We’ve seen this time and time again. Heroku isn’t the only example. It’s the tragedy of platform/infra startups.
- dadrian 3y ago
  That's backwards. Profitability at scale is about the _only_ way for a cloud provider to be profitable. There's a reason you don't see a bunch of small cloud providers, the economics only work at scale.
  - gizmo 3y ago
    Platform companies can't scale by just getting more of the type of customers they already have. They scale by getting bigger and more demanding customers. Those customers will expect the things AWS and the other big cloud platforms already offer. And then R&D expenses explode. The bigger they get the higher R&D will be. In absolute numbers and relative to revenue. Yes, it's true that if you become as big as AWS then economy of scale starts to work in your favor again. But that outcome is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. The realistic best case outcome is that they become a mid-sized cloud provider, like Digital Ocean. And Digital Ocean, in business for 11 years and having raised 500m (pre IPO) is still losing money. Linode, after 20 years of struggle, ultimately gave up and sold for $900m last year. Even the best case outcome looks pretty bleak.
    - nik736 3y ago
      Linode "gave up" with a 900M exit? How is that negative.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term? My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off. Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.
- mrkurt 3y ago
  The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power. I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Are you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for your existing customers? Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience? Or do you lock in customers?
    - mrkurt 3y ago
      We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to. You can buy 'em from a million different places. It's pretty easy to move off, though. `fly launch` generates a Dockerfile you can run pretty much anywhere.
  - xNeil 3y ago
    Yeah no I have to agree with you on this one. Every company is going to raise prices at one point or another - it might be inflation, it might be profit-chasing, padding for an IPO - whatever. Just because a startup might raise prices in the future shouldn't stop you from using their products - with a caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator. I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider just in case?
asadm 3y ago
> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript. Throwing shade at cloudflare edge workers?
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Anyone familiar with an up-to-date comparison between the two platforms?
davepeck 3y ago
My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?) Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?
- tptacek 3y ago
  I'd never used it before I joined Fly.io, but everybody else in this company absolutely adored it; they're like the Rolling Stones to our Black Crowes, the key influence.
- mrkurt 3y ago
  Most of Heroku's revenue is from Postgres. They're arguably a managed Postgres provider with some app hosting tooling (this is not fair, but an interesting way to think about Heroku). We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of apps. So Heroku felt very constrained. We see ourselves as, like, a good RPG. Quick to get going, rewarding and replayable when you go deep.
  - craigkerstiens 3y ago
    I'd dispute that MOST of the revenue is from Postgres, though it is likely a very large double digit percentage of revenue. Their managed Postgres got an unfair advantage early on by being the default. With a new rails app you were just given a Heroku Postgres database. Heroku's Postgres offering was over 5 years ahead of RDS Postgres and a large part of the reason Amazon added support for Postgres for years they fought it, but eventually had to give into the constant customer request. Unfortunately that innovation of Postgres has stalled out a bit over time due to Salesforce starvation. I do admit for what people think of as PaaS the Postgres revenue is significant, the part people would probably be surprised about is how much revenue the add-ons marketplace constitutes. Interestingly New Relic got the same privileged experience in the early days and it resulted in the same type of revenue and mass adoption for New Relic.
- Zetice 3y ago
smallerfish 3y ago
Congrats! Please focus on getting your documentation cleaned up, your cli consistent, and bugs excised. Your platform is good, and doesn't need too many additional features. Make it all cleaner, rinse and repeat.
gaffneyc 3y ago
I'm a pretty happy Fly.io customer and glad to see the direction things have been going overall. While it's great to see Fly is getting more resources to continue improving and building the business I worry about the inevitable VC Countdown Clock to Exit. What does this new round mean for Fly's long term independence?
- mrkurt 3y ago
  I don't think we can build a company like this without a lot of money. We're to the point where we're making $10-25mm capital expenditures in one go. And we have to to optimize our own costs. Optimizing our own costs means long term independence. What I think I've learned about VCs is: the trick to long term independence is to find investors who already value the sales mechanism. Bottoms up, dev focused "sales" is something investors like, now (this was not true in 2012).
dools 3y ago
Have you had a crack at making VoIP call quality better globally? It’s one of those things you can’t cache but I bet there are still some fancy things you can do to speed it up.
- MH15 3y ago
  Fly.io does VoIP calling?
  - dools 3y ago
    That’s what I would like to know
stephen 3y ago
I really like their acknowledgement that they expected to be used for game/edge caching/etc, but in reality everyone is using them as a new Heroku to deploy Rails+PG crud apps. Afaiu they're asserting their next goal is to make edge-ify-ing Rails+PG apps trivial / a "two hour problem". That's pretty bold...historically that's required very app/framework/domain-specific concerns/coupling around "what's the best way (if possible) to shard this domain model", and solving it as PaaS/IaaS basically means writing/running a distributed CloudSQL / Aurora. Which I guess if it's "just" running an Aurora clone/neon seamlessly in their stack, that seems doable/achievable + very worthwhile as a value-add/product.
GGO 3y ago
Fly.io might be an underdog now, but they will come out on top in 5~6 years when most of the small to medium size businesses will be running on it.
- hinkley 3y ago
  In 3-4 years they will announce a merger.
styren 3y ago
I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 person team with no need to scale in sight.
- mrkurt 3y ago
  I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers build better stuff over a long period of time. This takes _forever_ because companies-with-procurement-processes are designed to not buy critical infrastructure from startups. It's working for us so far, even if it's not for you yet.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I was hoping Kurt was going to do an extended spiel on hardware margins and bandwidth pricing. You should keep needling him for this, because it's super interesting.
    - kasey_junk 3y ago
      I want my ip address blog post!
    - wferrell 3y ago
      Please Kurt!
  - Dwolb 3y ago
    If your customers are really SMBs it’d make sense to partner with low-code/no-code platforms. Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small brain).
whitepoplar 3y ago
Since you're hosting your own hardware, one request: if you end up doing managed Postgres, please give customers as much fast, local NVMe storage as they can use. 1M IOPS? Done. 10TB database on local NVMe? No problem.
- mrkurt 3y ago
  Local NVMe makes this a much more fun project than it would have been 10 years ago.
isoprophlex 3y ago
> And hardware-accelerated inferencing. :eyes emoji: fly ppl please do this
muhammadusman 3y ago
Having left DigitalOcean for Fly.io the DX is definitely an improvement. I don’t have any huge apps running there so can’t say how it scales but starting out has been super easy.
pier25 3y ago
Congrats Kurt and the Fly team!!!!
da39a3ee 3y ago
Can someone remind me, what is "edge"? It it hosting server-side applications in a position in the network topology that minimizes latency to end users? Or is it that, but for static resources (so similar to the concept of CDN)?
- tptacek 3y ago
  It's the term of art for the portions of the Internet closest to specific customers, and, more generally, for the notion of deploying things in multiple locations, simultaneously such that they're close to users in different cities.
  - da39a3ee 3y ago
    And probably to state the obvious, this is to help use cases where UX is negatively impacted by the latency of client <-> server RPCs/Http requests? Are the proponents of "the edge" as a concept motivated largely by concern for people in countries far from the data centers hosting apps they are using, and/or with low bandwidth infrastructure?
    - tptacek 3y ago
      As a rule of thumb, anything above about 100ms has perceptible latency to end users (even if they're not consciously thinking about it, they're noticing it). Depending on your application, and how captive your users are, you may or may not care about this perception. If you're taking users through filing an insurance claim, you don't, because your users can't go anywhere. But if your users are filling a shopping cart, or paying for content with their attention, you care a lot more, because lag eventually bounces users from your site. Further, there are features that aren't really tenable unless you get lag under control (somehow, either by eliminating it or by taming it with cashing, prediction, and interpolation). Game servers are everyone's canonical example here, but really any kind of real-time feature fits the bill. Now, most CRUD applications don't have real-time features, so this might not be a big motivator. But one subtle bet we're making is that more apps would do interesting real-time things if it that latency problem was easy to solve. The big problem you have if you're working on these problems is that it's very difficult to fit into this kind of latency budget if all your stuff is hosted in Loudoun County, because the speed of light is eating most (all?) of that 100ms. That's the logic of wanting to get deployed in multiple cities simultaneously. There's more than one way to do it! We're just one possible solution.
syrusakbary 3y ago
I wish they mentioned how their service competes against new-comers to the space such as Wasmer Edge [1]. (they kind of mention Javascript, I guess in reference to Cloudflare Workers, but they miss Wasm somehow!). In any case, congrats to their team and VCs on the round! [1] https://wasmer.io/products/edge https://wasmer.io/products/edge
jacobsenscott 3y ago
How is fly.io different (or even better) than just fronting your entire app, including the dynamic content with cloudfront or another CDN? The CDN is close to the client giving you low latency ssl setup, which can be significant. I get that this doesn't push your app servers to the edge, but even if you did that you still pay the latency cost of hitting your database in the bunker in Virginia. For many (most?) apps this seems worse as you are making many round trips to the db for a single web request. I would rather pay the latency cost on the web request, and have fast access to the database from the app server. Seems like fly's target audience is mostly static content?
- tptacek 3y ago
  The exact opposite: we're a fullstack platform, so our target audience is largely people who don't just host static Javascript.
  - jacobsenscott 3y ago
    Maybe I'm mis-understanding the "Deploy App Servers Close to Your Users" thing. I don't get how moving your app servers far from your database makes things faster. Typically the app is more chatty with the db than with the client. So it is better for your app and db servers to be close together, even if they are far from some segment of users. If fly made distributed databases "heroku easy" that would be impressive, but it seems that's not a part of the offering? https://fly.io/docs/database-storage-guides/#other-storage-apps https://fly.io/docs/database-storage-guides/#other-storage-a...
    - tptacek 3y ago
      We have a "built-in" (for lack of a better term --- it's just another Fly app) multi-region single-write-leader clustered Postgres offering, but people also run their own databases directly here; the core feature is regionalized durable NVMe storage.
      - skybrian 3y ago
lobo_tuerto 3y ago
Hope you can implement a dark mode for your blog/site now that you are big. Or at least make it friendly to Dark Reader (a well known browser extension for sites that don't implement a dark mode). Currently all your code blocks are black rectangles under it (easy to turn the offending style off using dev tools).
wesleyyue 3y ago
Please implement better support for rolling back deployments!
kart23 3y ago
https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should-know/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should... > If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly Apps, there are many great options, including: Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's direct competitors.
- tpetry 3y ago
  It will take them months to build something competing. Should they tell everyone to bot fly because they don‘t have their own database solution yet?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Even if I granted your premise that these are direct competitors (they most certainly aren't)... why not?
- danieljacksonno 3y ago
  What? Of course they should. It shows they care about their customers, and that they are confident in their use case and honest when they say what they are a good fit for or not
  - kart23 3y ago
    i guess, but when you do this it increases the amount of people who think, “if i’m already going to this company for my database and they offer the same things fly does, why not just go there?”
duxup 3y ago
"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be. It's unfortunate but for me it's not a phrase I want to see. I want to hear how they are profitable based on their operations and paying customers or other non VC or IPO type income. That gives me confidence in their stability. To be clear that's not a disagreement with the title or blog, seems like a fine article that is fairly up front, but it's hard for me to really see "we raised a bunch of money" as a positive from a customer perspective anymore.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be. This is where I always get burned. As they get larger and larger, and the product gets more complex, they see it as value that I'm not paying for, but I see it as negative value because I'm forced to deal with all the added complexity that I don't even want. Then, one day, they decide I shouldn't be "freeloading" on their super awesome platform and change pricing to something that isn't even close to reasonable for me. It's like hiring someone to cut your grass and a few years later you go outside to find 3 guys on riding lawnmowers telling you that prices are going up because obviously you're not paying enough to cover the costs of the service you're getting. It's not my fault they scaled their business to accommodate customers with 10 acre lawns and assumed I needed the same level of service, but I'm the one left without lawn care.
  - aeyes 3y ago
    Also the guy who you hired to cut your grass now also lugs around all the tools to take care of your pool, your car and your house. Take all or nothing.
dccoolgai 3y ago
I don't understand all these comments coming out of the woodwork like "oh, no - one day they may raise prices and try to be the bad guys". I don't plan on using fly personally, but I don't understand how you could look at another provider entering the market and parse that as a "bad thing".
killthebuddha 3y ago
It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores. It makes me feel like I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about internet application architectures.
- catgirlinspace 3y ago
  > ... the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores. I've been building a little hobby-ish project recently to serve a gaming community I'm in (Splatoon) and I've been using fly.io for it. Being able to run it in multiple regions is useful for this in my opinion because the Splatoon community isn't just concentrated in one place, it's all over. If I hosted in the US then players from Japan would suffer and vice versa. Even if this little project doesn't go anywhere, I still see it as a (probably) rather useful experience for someday when I'm like, out of school and stuff. It's really neat to learn about I think. Right now I have it running in the Eastern US, Amsterdam, and Tokyo for about $10/month.
- pphysch 3y ago
  It's the age old conundrum where every other startup presumes they will hit "Google-scale" and therefore needs the latest shiny Google-scale architecture from day 1, whether that is K8s, SPA, GraphQL, or edge deployments. Sell spades during a gold rush.
- esafak 3y ago
  It means you can pick them without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales.
theossuary 3y ago
Is there any interest in working with telcos to manage MECs? It seems like they've finally given up on building their own container orchestration, and are now looking at Google's GDCE & Amazon's Outpost. But those fundamentally aren't good models for MEC. I could definitely see a really interesting future for Fly where you're building tech to actively follow users between towers to provide the lowest possible latency to apps.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
It's gonna be a sad day when they get bought by a larger company and this writing style is crushed by corporate monotony.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  See also the Match Group moment for the OkCupid blog, the Oracle moment for Renesys/DynResearch.
mirchiseth 3y ago
Razing money or not as a self proclaimed PaaS geek I have always enjoyed reading fly.io blogs. Two of my favorites are How they run containers as VMs [1] and How they outgrew Hashicorp Nomad and wrote their own scheduler [2] [1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] - https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/ https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...
- ignoramous 3y ago
  The serverless server by Will Jordan is one of the best biztech posts I've read in the past few years: https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/ https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/
tl 3y ago
Minor nit: > The kind of platform company we want to be hasn’t changed since 2020. Our features are all generally a command or two in flyctl, and they work for any app that can packaged in a container. can be packaged
nickstinemates 3y ago
I am a big fan of the next gen heroku competitors. At the top of the list are fly.io and railway.app.
robertlagrant 3y ago
I'm in health tech and one killer feature would be being able to route and store an individual's requests through and data in a particular location. So I can deploy a health app backend that allows its users to decide where to put their data.
- thomasfortes 3y ago
  Something like this: https://fly.io/docs/reference/dynamic-request-routing/#the-fly-prefer-region-request-header https://fly.io/docs/reference/dynamic-request-routing/#the-f...? You probably would have to handle a lot of the logic by yourself for privacy and security reason, but I think this is a nice primitive to start from.
sriram_sun 3y ago
I really like the "Here's what's not changing" section. Honorable mention for Twilio. Also, the kind of platform companies where you sign up and play tend to get acquired and become the kind where you sign up and a sales person calls you!
- ericghildyal 3y ago
  I've been going through the sales gauntlet lately for a new company I'm working on, and it's ROUGH! I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been written.
turbobooster 3y ago
[dead]
dorongrinstein 3y ago
Fly.io marketing is top notch. Unlike fly.io, https://controlplane.com https://controlplane.com lets you run at the edge, super easily but on any compute substrate, not just on one vendor's (Equinix). Your own machines, your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Hetzner, Linode, Contabo, etc. accounts, or on Control Plane's many locations in all clouds. On Control Plane you instantly define a "Global Virtual Cloud" made up of any location you specify (your own, or ours, or both). You get a GLOBAL endpoint where a customer in NY gets a response from aws-us-east2 for example, and a customer in L.A. gets a response from aws-us-west2 for example. Of course, AWS is just one of many locations you get run compute on. We're about to release a multi-master Postgres offering and unlike Fly.io, we're 100% K8s, but if you don't know a thing about K8s, you're in luck. You don't need to know a thing about Kubernetes. You simply get secrets management, logs, metrics, tracing, alerting, mutual TLS between services, service discovery, software defined VPN between locations, private link support, direct connect support, your unlimited logs, metrics, audit trail all included and military grade fine-grained access control, audit trail and extreme cost optimization - you pay by the millicore of CPU and MB of RAM. The best part is that you can mix-n-match ANY of the services of AWS, GCP and Azure (Big Table, RDS, DynamoDB, Active Directory, S3, etc.) and not deal with IAM (identity & access management) complexity. Never deal with credentials and go from code --> unbreakable TLS endpoint in 30 seconds. If AWS goes down your endpoint is humming along. You get all the control, without the pain. If you are already a K8s expert and have Helm charts, CRDs, controllers and other existing compute artifacts, we support you out of the box. If you don't know cloud-native - that is OK: just check in your code, the platform containerizes it for you and BOOM - you get a TLS endpoint (with your own domain) and you'll never hear things like "the certificate expired, prometheus fell over, vault needs to be upgraded, we need a new version of Istio, etc.". I urge you to see a demo because a talking about it and seeing it are completely different things. Feel free to visit https://controlplane.com https://controlplane.com and I promise you will be shocked in a good way. Doron, CEO of Control Plane Corporation.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  Congratulations, CP looks neat. I am compelled to point out, I am mostly shocked by the lack of paragraphs.
deleted 3y ago
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miahwilde 3y ago
Here's what we believed in 2023: people want solutions they can understand in two hours. Here's what everyone actually wanted to talk about: Trust. Here's what we missed: ...
carlosbaraza 3y ago
Edge computing is definitely the last way hosting providers have found to vendor lock you in. Many companies like 37Signals realize that all the fancy cloud provider services have a huge cost because they literally hold you hostage to the mercy of their pricing teams. In a time of high interest rates, I deeply value our commitment to open source container solutions. The only thing we can't do at the moment is to spin an edge network; that's their mote, and why keep doubling down on edge. They double down regardless of knowing most apps top performance offenders don't include the latency to the end user. The bookstore they mention in the article would be much better off deploying all containers in a single cheap commoditized VPS with docker compose, that'd reduce latency between services, and then they can concentrate on optimizing their app and their DB queries. Don't waste time in saving a few milliseconds between your server and the end user, opening a massive can of worms that includes distributed databases, complex infrastructure, vendor lock in, and many other issues they'd happily charge you for. I wrote a simple library to deploy with docker compose that includes logging, metrics, and a few other utils. https://lostdock.com https://lostdock.com
consultSKI 3y ago
Okay, help me here... with Dockers why would I want to go back to VMs?
moneywoes 3y ago
For the uninitiated, what does Fly do that Amazon does not through AWS?

643 points by charliermarsh 3y ago

“ The result of this is an Internet where all of the world's CRUD apps are hosted in Loudoun County, VA (motto: "where tradition meets innovation"), at Amazon's us-east-1 in Ashburn, a city with so many Rails apps that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors.” So true it hurts

buf 3y ago
I'm at least 50 of them
deleted 3y ago
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yieldcrv 3y ago
> that one of them was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. can you explain this part of the joke?
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  In Florida you have so many hispanic citizens that they have significant representation in local politics. In this specific county you have more cloud servers serving rails apps. However, they're not citizens and can't get elected to public service.
  - titanomachy 3y ago
    This answer, while correct, somehow feels very GPT.
    - SonOfLilit 3y ago
      Honestly the question felt very Llama in the sense that it didn't really pass my Turing test, so I couldn't really answer it in a way that didn't feel robotic.
- dswalter 3y ago
  The idea is that Rails apps are such a large portion of the population that they elected a representative from within themselves. It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    EC2 instances are almost certainly a supermajority of the population. What's surprising is that there are still humans on the county board! Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.
    - jeremyjh 3y ago
      Most Rails apps just aren't engaged politically. More education and activism is necessary to mobilize them.
- afterburner 3y ago
  Maybe also related to the recent news of a small town in Delaware allowing corporations to vote in municipal elections (not a new thing for Delaware apparently).
- arandr0x 3y ago
  In a reverse Turing moment, I actually submitted this joke to a chatbot, and it got it.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    ChatGPT doesn't know that I was hoping there was some truth to it after September 2021.
sneak 3y ago
How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It's great, and it shows in their docs also. Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
  - TheFlyingFish 3y ago
    Oh man, early Slack was great. Back in ~2015 or so I submitted a ticket about something trivial (why I could no longer hide the menubar or something, I forget), but just for fun I did it all in stilted archaic language like you'd see in the 1600s or something. "Behold, in days of yore when the Users of the Land sought refuge from the tiresome typing that had so bedeviled their lives hitherto..." etc. Anyway, their CS team responded in kind. Hands-down the most fun I've ever had with a support ticket.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Does VC like snarky? Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product. In a corpo it's sleazy
- jeremy_k 3y ago
  I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?
  - swyx 3y ago
    theyre extremely correlated. writing is thinking.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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candiddevmike 3y ago
Unfortunately for fly, us-east-1 has better reliability then their product.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We're not. For a company of our age and scale? To claim competitive reliability to the world's most important data center? Risible. We're making fun of the fact that everybody deploys their apps in a random city in Virginia with like 3 restaurants in it. We're not saying they're dumb to do it, or that Ashburn isn't up to the challenge --- it self-evidently is. (The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    You guys may want to rebrand once you get your issues sorted out. Fly is going to have the same problem as btrfs, where folks will have a hard time deciding if it's ready for production yet.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      It's comments like this that moved me to claim, in our infra/ops job post, the benefit "The most lovable user base in the whole technology industry, and a company culture that will keep you in touch with them directly."
      - culi 3y ago
        Fly.io was the darling of the webhosting world amongst techworkers particularly because of the honest transparent communication and blog posts explicitly admitting fuck ups Raising a bunch of money just isn't a "good" announcement to most of us. When unpopular things have happened with the company, your communication usually directly acknowledges and focuses on the concerns of the userbase. This serves two purposes: 1. It gives you a chance to show concrete steps to prevent specific concerns we have 2. Perhaps more importantly, it shows we're all on the same page and you're actually in touch with how your userbase thinks Failing on #1 is something you can fix later, but I've never seen a company rebound from losing the trust gained by #2. It loses confidence that future decisions made can also be equally out of touch. I've never seen a company rebound from losing that confidence
kkielhofner 3y ago
People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc. I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends. When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.
- kortilla 3y ago
  The realities of regions don’t go away. It’s a primitive to save you money. If a new entrant doesn’t have it they are either just operating in one region or you’re paying cross-region prices for everything.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    Cloudflare products and pricing (what I'm most familiar with) are in wild opposition to this view. I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea. Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?). One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".
jonluca 3y ago
This is a weird coincedence - I just published a blog post on this two days ago https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/snappy-internet
- mrkurt 3y ago
  This effect is bananas. The internet feels remarkably different in Sydney and Tokyo than it does in Chicago.
awkward 3y ago
Unfortunately, the motto is "I byde my time". Seems like he could have still made a joke without making it up.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We got this off the Loudoun County website! We do our research for these things!
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    While "where tradition meets innovation" is a set of words that the county puts on their logo, and appears to meet the definition of a motto, the parent is correct that the Official Motto is indeed "I Byde My Time". https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms "Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official motto. https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563 https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
    - tptacek 3y ago
      People wonder why I'm so addicted to this site, but I mean, it's obvious right here, isn't it?

buf 3y ago

Having grown up on Heroku, it's such a breath of fresh air to see companies innovating in this space. Render, Fly are the big ones, but even little one-man shops like Hatchbox are good enough to deploy medium-scale production apps. Kudos to these companies, the VCs, and the beta testers.

techn00 3y ago

Does fly use Equinox or something similar for their hardware?

mrkurt 3y ago
We use Equinix Metal / Packet in some places, our own hardware + colo in others, and something close to colo/hardware in more.

yolo3000 3y ago

So if the bookstore doesn't think it's worth it to spend more than 2 hours on deploying to the edge, maybe it's not that important to them, or :) ?

phaer 3y ago
I think fly.io believes that they can allow the bookstore to do so in less than two hours for a price where it's still important enough for the bookstore and profitable - in aggregate - for fly.io. I personally believe that could be true, but their investors going to find out ;)
- yolo3000 3y ago
  So change your infra to save a few hours :D I guess they have other compelling features.
  - benzible 3y ago
    Tell me you've never without telling me etc...
- mrkurt 3y ago
  Roughly this, yes. It's easy to run boring apps close to your users. Thus, people buy computer time from us instead of a place that runs in one city.
  - davnicwil 3y ago
    I've long suspected this is what you guys would end up focusing on (and applaud it) -almost like an OS for edge compute that abstracts away its details while allowing boring architectures built for single-point to 'just run' on it. But is there a limit to how boring you can go? Can you truly, fully abstract over distributed systems stuff like eventual consistency and its basically random effects on UX in certain usage edge cases? Or do you think 'boring' will have to meet you in the middle with frameworks and developer mindset also shifting over time to a more edge-first world?

kayodelycaon 3y ago

> What people actually wanted to talk about, though? Databases. And they completely avoid discussing it again in this article. It would be nice if I could know what their product is for because it doesn't seem to be the apps I work on.

dementik 3y ago
I presume they start discussing about it when LiteFS is matured enough.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
This is a "raised money" post. So presumably they raised money so they can have a database answer in the future.
- tptacek 3y ago
  We have a multi-region single-write-leader Postgres offering now, but "databases" means lots of things to lots of people, and the platform strategy is to build durable storage primitives that work for as many different databases as possible. People run things like Cockroach here, and edge deployment also makes SQLite especially interesting.
  - tylergetsay 3y ago
    Do you have any info about how edge deployments + sqlite work and what kind of applications they are limited to?
    - mrkurt 3y ago
      Basically, LiteFS: https://github.com/superfly/litefs https://github.com/superfly/litefs And then some load balancer cleverness that reroutes writes to a specific VM: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/ https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/
      - 3y ago

h1fra 3y ago

Congrats! I love Fly.io, used it for side projects and I was very pleased with the UX and the free tier. The blog post is funny but the style is a bit excruciating to read.

xianshou 3y ago

Self-aware commentary like this only works if used sparingly, but this one is extremely effective - acknowledges the mercenary motivations, implicit hypocrisy, and self-aggrandization of such announcements while nonetheless communicating all the important information and succinctly breaking down a real problem that their platform solves. On top of that, the legitimate uses of funding are clearly identified, answering any questions about both "why" and "how much". Cheers, guys.

brabel 3y ago
I loved it. They stayed as far away as possible for your traditional grandiose, jargon-filled, corporate speak we normally get in these announcenments. They definitely gained a few points with me :).

yieldcrv 3y ago

so I'm guessing Vercel and Netlify deploy cloud functions only to the "least worst datacenter"? while Fly.io deploys compute instances to more regions and also has a database? asking because I've been content with Vercel and Netlify's CDN for frontend assets and simply stopped doing system design around relational storage, when I want to stay on a free tier.

tptacek 3y ago
We're a full stack platform, most frequently compared to Heroku --- a place you'd run a Rails, Elixir, or Django app.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings? Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Vercel (for instance) does pure serverless --- you configure "functions" that are invoked by their orchestrator --- that are all Javascript, or compiled to JS/WASM. Fly.io takes Docker containers, turns them into VMs, and lets you decide where and when to have them running. One isn't better than the other; they're just totally different models for hosting applications. The Fly.io model is much closer to what Heroku did, just modernized (with Docker, edge deployments, the `fly-proxy`, etc).
PKop 3y ago
More languages is the bigger difference... also not just cloud functions but full servers.
- yieldcrv 3y ago

h_mirin 3y ago

I like fly.io because it's just (much) better Heroku. I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.

danpalmer 3y ago
This is the biggest draw for me. I don't have a need for Fly at the moment, like I have not needed Heroku most of the time, but its got strong mindshare for me. Heroku was basically great, and apart from not quite keeping up with modern practices and having recent outages, it's still otherwise a great UX. Fly feels like that but updated for the modern age.
unshavedyak 3y ago
I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system. Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a continual set of asterisks.. but i'm probably being unfair and PTSD'y. Think i should give Fly a look? I at least find their SQLite features super interesting
- mrkurt 3y ago
  A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some months are better than others). Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each. Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    Does Fly handle price caps? Ie to setup pricing to replicate ~$5/m behavior. Helping to ensure i can't use up all my ~$5/m budget in a few days of traffic, but i also can't go over some specified cap. If so i'll probably give it a try! edit: Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i can keep pricing similar. Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah. edit2: Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit and a subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month. Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money. [1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-month/714/6 https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...

lawrencechen 3y ago

> There are two kinds of platform companies : the kind where you can get your Python or Rust or Julia code running nicely, and the kind where you find a way to recompile it to Javascript. Playful jab on Cloudflare and Deno. Would be interesting if Fly took up hosting "WASM containers" in addition to Docker containers.

Havoc 3y ago
Cloudflare works are/can be wasm too btw
ignoramous 3y ago
That's a jab at wasmer, fermyon et al (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508077), me thinks. I think, the jab on Cloudflare was the "get a salesperson to call" part.

OriginalMrPink 3y ago

The headline and even the article reads like a big nothing burger.

berkle4455 3y ago
A company with ~60 employees raising $70M seems pretty noteworthy to me. That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/ https://fly.io/jobs/.
- OriginalMrPink 3y ago
  I'm not doubting this at all. But let me be more specific what I don't like about their communication. "$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time. "There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb." I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.
  - comice 3y ago
    > We’re all adults here, we can talk about this stuff, right? proceeds to not really talk about it
    - tptacek 3y ago
      What more were you hoping to hear? We were really blunt about it. We wrote this post in attempt to sign Alcoa as a customer.
      - comice 3y ago

secondcoming 3y ago

Wow, it took a really long time to get to what this company claims to do. Spinning up VMs. It's not difficult to do this on AWS or GCP.

joshcanhelp 3y ago

A but if a side note but … their jobs page is pretty great. Nothing available but they already have very specific and interesting descriptions written for all the positions they have or expect to have. Feels like they are being very mindful about the company they are building.

examplary_cable 3y ago

I'm currently using fly.io and I have no complains so far(most of the problems I had were my fault like a DNS/IP/Certification problem).

Scarbutt 3y ago

Why is Fly.io so praised here? couldn't run any production workload on them cause of all the technical issues they have.

reeaper 3y ago
I did have my postgresql DB on their service randomly stop once and didn't restart until I logged in and poked it :(
buf 3y ago
I also don't use fly (yet) because of technical issues they have. They are in a really messy state at the moment. Nevertheless, I'm excited for them and continue to cheer them on until they mature.
ignoramous 3y ago
Running (diskless) production workloads on Fly.io since 2021 (300+ req/sec across 30+ regions). Sure you ran into problems almost every month back then, but not anymore. Not in my experience.

fishtoaster 3y ago

"Why do startups write announcements like these?" I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read tech press. There's nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I'm just surprised they acknowledged mercenary reasons without mentioning what I've seen as the most common one.

eduction 3y ago
Saying it's "for press" just kicks the can down the road, raising the question "why do startups want press on announcements like these?" They do it to get out a certain message and leave a certain impression, usually of the mercenary sort the post outlines. Although I see your point about it just being to get the name of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary motivation that the post maybe did not mention.
- bearjaws 3y ago
  The math is pretty straight forward. Cost to make article = $2000 Article gets 100,000 views Fly.io converts 1% of views to paying customers 1,000 new customers. Revenue per customer = $10 monthly MRR goes up by $10,000 Obviously I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, but there a pretty direct path to value. This is way more efficient than Google ads in a competitive space, I can only imagine hosting related ads are $3-5 per click...
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    That math works for any old blog post. Advertising a raise specifically is to get attention from customers and the industry as a legitimized successful operation.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      At the very least, it's marketing. I have no idea what they do, as I'm not in that particular web development niche and don't know what an "edgy app" is, but it made it to the top of HN, so people like me now know at least that there exists a company called fly.io.

mattmaroon 3y ago

One of the best-written press releases I’ve seen for sure.

catchnear4321 3y ago

> Our first reason is obvious, and mercenary. even though there’s a reason (or three) behind the style of the post, including the use of transparency, it is refreshing.

cvwright 3y ago

> There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the margins work. Amen to that. Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it. But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"

mrkurt 3y ago
They should, probably. We have partner-like customers who are paying actual hardware costs and then a platform fee for us to manage it. You can only build so many company margins on top of capital expenditures.
jacobsenscott 3y ago
I don't think there's enough expertise in running hardware out there, frankly. For a company where running hardware isn't their bread and butter finding and hiring people who can do it, and do it well, is existentially risky. It is hard enough to find people who can properly run on a PaaS.

gizmo 3y ago

Okay so they raised 100m which means they need to work towards a 1bn exit. And if they want to keep their momentum going their r&d cost will go through the roof. Because they have to build the whole stack and it all has to be rock solid (eventually). It’s an immense engineering effort. I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real expense is r&d, marketing and SBC and those will rule out profitability at any scale. These are not one-time expenses. You have to keep spending forever or your customers will leave. We’ve seen this time and time again. Heroku isn’t the only example. It’s the tragedy of platform/infra startups.

dadrian 3y ago
That's backwards. Profitability at scale is about the _only_ way for a cloud provider to be profitable. There's a reason you don't see a bunch of small cloud providers, the economics only work at scale.
- gizmo 3y ago
  Platform companies can't scale by just getting more of the type of customers they already have. They scale by getting bigger and more demanding customers. Those customers will expect the things AWS and the other big cloud platforms already offer. And then R&D expenses explode. The bigger they get the higher R&D will be. In absolute numbers and relative to revenue. Yes, it's true that if you become as big as AWS then economy of scale starts to work in your favor again. But that outcome is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. The realistic best case outcome is that they become a mid-sized cloud provider, like Digital Ocean. And Digital Ocean, in business for 11 years and having raised 500m (pre IPO) is still losing money. Linode, after 20 years of struggle, ultimately gave up and sold for $900m last year. Even the best case outcome looks pretty bleak.
  - nik736 3y ago
    Linode "gave up" with a 900M exit? How is that negative.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term? My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off. Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.

mrkurt 3y ago
The simple answer is: we sell something people want to pay for (VM time, network services, etc). We'll obviously want to improve our margins over time, but there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power. I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Are you offering 5- year rolling guaranteed price caps for your existing customers? Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience? Or do you lock in customers?
  - mrkurt 3y ago
    We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to. You can buy 'em from a million different places. It's pretty easy to move off, though. `fly launch` generates a Dockerfile you can run pretty much anywhere.
- xNeil 3y ago
  Yeah no I have to agree with you on this one. Every company is going to raise prices at one point or another - it might be inflation, it might be profit-chasing, padding for an IPO - whatever. Just because a startup might raise prices in the future shouldn't stop you from using their products - with a caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator. I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider just in case?

asadm 3y ago

unshavedyak 3y ago
Anyone familiar with an up-to-date comparison between the two platforms?

davepeck 3y ago

My impression is that when fly.io has been discussed in the recent past on HN, the conversation tends to be less about databases and more about Heroku alternatives. (?) Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?

tptacek 3y ago
I'd never used it before I joined Fly.io, but everybody else in this company absolutely adored it; they're like the Rolling Stones to our Black Crowes, the key influence.
mrkurt 3y ago
Most of Heroku's revenue is from Postgres. They're arguably a managed Postgres provider with some app hosting tooling (this is not fair, but an interesting way to think about Heroku). We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of apps. So Heroku felt very constrained. We see ourselves as, like, a good RPG. Quick to get going, rewarding and replayable when you go deep.
- craigkerstiens 3y ago
  I'd dispute that MOST of the revenue is from Postgres, though it is likely a very large double digit percentage of revenue. Their managed Postgres got an unfair advantage early on by being the default. With a new rails app you were just given a Heroku Postgres database. Heroku's Postgres offering was over 5 years ahead of RDS Postgres and a large part of the reason Amazon added support for Postgres for years they fought it, but eventually had to give into the constant customer request. Unfortunately that innovation of Postgres has stalled out a bit over time due to Salesforce starvation. I do admit for what people think of as PaaS the Postgres revenue is significant, the part people would probably be surprised about is how much revenue the add-ons marketplace constitutes. Interestingly New Relic got the same privileged experience in the early days and it resulted in the same type of revenue and mass adoption for New Relic.
Zetice 3y ago

smallerfish 3y ago

Congrats! Please focus on getting your documentation cleaned up, your cli consistent, and bugs excised. Your platform is good, and doesn't need too many additional features. Make it all cleaner, rinse and repeat.

gaffneyc 3y ago

I'm a pretty happy Fly.io customer and glad to see the direction things have been going overall. While it's great to see Fly is getting more resources to continue improving and building the business I worry about the inevitable VC Countdown Clock to Exit. What does this new round mean for Fly's long term independence?

mrkurt 3y ago
I don't think we can build a company like this without a lot of money. We're to the point where we're making $10-25mm capital expenditures in one go. And we have to to optimize our own costs. Optimizing our own costs means long term independence. What I think I've learned about VCs is: the trick to long term independence is to find investors who already value the sales mechanism. Bottoms up, dev focused "sales" is something investors like, now (this was not true in 2012).

dools 3y ago

Have you had a crack at making VoIP call quality better globally? It’s one of those things you can’t cache but I bet there are still some fancy things you can do to speed it up.

MH15 3y ago
Fly.io does VoIP calling?
- dools 3y ago
  That’s what I would like to know

stephen 3y ago

I really like their acknowledgement that they expected to be used for game/edge caching/etc, but in reality everyone is using them as a new Heroku to deploy Rails+PG crud apps. Afaiu they're asserting their next goal is to make edge-ify-ing Rails+PG apps trivial / a "two hour problem". That's pretty bold...historically that's required very app/framework/domain-specific concerns/coupling around "what's the best way (if possible) to shard this domain model", and solving it as PaaS/IaaS basically means writing/running a distributed CloudSQL / Aurora. Which I guess if it's "just" running an Aurora clone/neon seamlessly in their stack, that seems doable/achievable + very worthwhile as a value-add/product.

GGO 3y ago

Fly.io might be an underdog now, but they will come out on top in 5~6 years when most of the small to medium size businesses will be running on it.

hinkley 3y ago
In 3-4 years they will announce a merger.

styren 3y ago

I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 person team with no need to scale in sight.

mrkurt 3y ago
I don't want to sound flippant, because this is hard as fuck, but the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins, attract customers, help them grow. We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware. For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers build better stuff over a long period of time. This takes _forever_ because companies-with-procurement-processes are designed to not buy critical infrastructure from startups. It's working for us so far, even if it's not for you yet.
- tptacek 3y ago
  I was hoping Kurt was going to do an extended spiel on hardware margins and bandwidth pricing. You should keep needling him for this, because it's super interesting.
  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    I want my ip address blog post!
  - wferrell 3y ago
    Please Kurt!
- Dwolb 3y ago
  If your customers are really SMBs it’d make sense to partner with low-code/no-code platforms. Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small brain).

whitepoplar 3y ago

Since you're hosting your own hardware, one request: if you end up doing managed Postgres, please give customers as much fast, local NVMe storage as they can use. 1M IOPS? Done. 10TB database on local NVMe? No problem.

mrkurt 3y ago
Local NVMe makes this a much more fun project than it would have been 10 years ago.

isoprophlex 3y ago

> And hardware-accelerated inferencing. :eyes emoji: fly ppl please do this

muhammadusman 3y ago

Having left DigitalOcean for Fly.io the DX is definitely an improvement. I don’t have any huge apps running there so can’t say how it scales but starting out has been super easy.

pier25 3y ago

Congrats Kurt and the Fly team!!!!

da39a3ee 3y ago

Can someone remind me, what is "edge"? It it hosting server-side applications in a position in the network topology that minimizes latency to end users? Or is it that, but for static resources (so similar to the concept of CDN)?

tptacek 3y ago
It's the term of art for the portions of the Internet closest to specific customers, and, more generally, for the notion of deploying things in multiple locations, simultaneously such that they're close to users in different cities.
- da39a3ee 3y ago
  And probably to state the obvious, this is to help use cases where UX is negatively impacted by the latency of client <-> server RPCs/Http requests? Are the proponents of "the edge" as a concept motivated largely by concern for people in countries far from the data centers hosting apps they are using, and/or with low bandwidth infrastructure?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    As a rule of thumb, anything above about 100ms has perceptible latency to end users (even if they're not consciously thinking about it, they're noticing it). Depending on your application, and how captive your users are, you may or may not care about this perception. If you're taking users through filing an insurance claim, you don't, because your users can't go anywhere. But if your users are filling a shopping cart, or paying for content with their attention, you care a lot more, because lag eventually bounces users from your site. Further, there are features that aren't really tenable unless you get lag under control (somehow, either by eliminating it or by taming it with cashing, prediction, and interpolation). Game servers are everyone's canonical example here, but really any kind of real-time feature fits the bill. Now, most CRUD applications don't have real-time features, so this might not be a big motivator. But one subtle bet we're making is that more apps would do interesting real-time things if it that latency problem was easy to solve. The big problem you have if you're working on these problems is that it's very difficult to fit into this kind of latency budget if all your stuff is hosted in Loudoun County, because the speed of light is eating most (all?) of that 100ms. That's the logic of wanting to get deployed in multiple cities simultaneously. There's more than one way to do it! We're just one possible solution.

syrusakbary 3y ago

I wish they mentioned how their service competes against new-comers to the space such as Wasmer Edge [1]. (they kind of mention Javascript, I guess in reference to Cloudflare Workers, but they miss Wasm somehow!). In any case, congrats to their team and VCs on the round! [1] https://wasmer.io/products/edge https://wasmer.io/products/edge

jacobsenscott 3y ago

How is fly.io different (or even better) than just fronting your entire app, including the dynamic content with cloudfront or another CDN? The CDN is close to the client giving you low latency ssl setup, which can be significant. I get that this doesn't push your app servers to the edge, but even if you did that you still pay the latency cost of hitting your database in the bunker in Virginia. For many (most?) apps this seems worse as you are making many round trips to the db for a single web request. I would rather pay the latency cost on the web request, and have fast access to the database from the app server. Seems like fly's target audience is mostly static content?

tptacek 3y ago
The exact opposite: we're a fullstack platform, so our target audience is largely people who don't just host static Javascript.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  Maybe I'm mis-understanding the "Deploy App Servers Close to Your Users" thing. I don't get how moving your app servers far from your database makes things faster. Typically the app is more chatty with the db than with the client. So it is better for your app and db servers to be close together, even if they are far from some segment of users. If fly made distributed databases "heroku easy" that would be impressive, but it seems that's not a part of the offering? https://fly.io/docs/database-storage-guides/#other-storage-apps https://fly.io/docs/database-storage-guides/#other-storage-a...
  - tptacek 3y ago
    We have a "built-in" (for lack of a better term --- it's just another Fly app) multi-region single-write-leader clustered Postgres offering, but people also run their own databases directly here; the core feature is regionalized durable NVMe storage.
    - skybrian 3y ago

lobo_tuerto 3y ago

Hope you can implement a dark mode for your blog/site now that you are big. Or at least make it friendly to Dark Reader (a well known browser extension for sites that don't implement a dark mode). Currently all your code blocks are black rectangles under it (easy to turn the offending style off using dev tools).

wesleyyue 3y ago

Please implement better support for rolling back deployments!

kart23 3y ago

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should-know/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should... > If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly Apps, there are many great options, including: Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's direct competitors.

tpetry 3y ago
It will take them months to build something competing. Should they tell everyone to bot fly because they don‘t have their own database solution yet?
tptacek 3y ago
Even if I granted your premise that these are direct competitors (they most certainly aren't)... why not?
danieljacksonno 3y ago
What? Of course they should. It shows they care about their customers, and that they are confident in their use case and honest when they say what they are a good fit for or not
- kart23 3y ago
  i guess, but when you do this it increases the amount of people who think, “if i’m already going to this company for my database and they offer the same things fly does, why not just go there?”

duxup 3y ago

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be. It's unfortunate but for me it's not a phrase I want to see. I want to hear how they are profitable based on their operations and paying customers or other non VC or IPO type income. That gives me confidence in their stability. To be clear that's not a disagreement with the title or blog, seems like a fine article that is fairly up front, but it's hard for me to really see "we raised a bunch of money" as a positive from a customer perspective anymore.

donmcronald 3y ago
> It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be. This is where I always get burned. As they get larger and larger, and the product gets more complex, they see it as value that I'm not paying for, but I see it as negative value because I'm forced to deal with all the added complexity that I don't even want. Then, one day, they decide I shouldn't be "freeloading" on their super awesome platform and change pricing to something that isn't even close to reasonable for me. It's like hiring someone to cut your grass and a few years later you go outside to find 3 guys on riding lawnmowers telling you that prices are going up because obviously you're not paying enough to cover the costs of the service you're getting. It's not my fault they scaled their business to accommodate customers with 10 acre lawns and assumed I needed the same level of service, but I'm the one left without lawn care.
- aeyes 3y ago
  Also the guy who you hired to cut your grass now also lugs around all the tools to take care of your pool, your car and your house. Take all or nothing.

dccoolgai 3y ago

I don't understand all these comments coming out of the woodwork like "oh, no - one day they may raise prices and try to be the bad guys". I don't plan on using fly personally, but I don't understand how you could look at another provider entering the market and parse that as a "bad thing".

killthebuddha 3y ago

It's always seemed to me that Fly has a really awesome, modern perspective on software engineering and that they'd be a great place to work, but I've also always felt like there's a glaring inconsistency between their marketing and product. What I mean is it seems like their marketing (and docs) are all about how trivial it is to spin up globally distributed app servers but the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores. It makes me feel like I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about internet application architectures.

catgirlinspace 3y ago
> ... the only customers who would need globally distributed app servers are almost certainly not worried about spinning up app servers because they've already got extremely mature platforms with globally distributed data stores. I've been building a little hobby-ish project recently to serve a gaming community I'm in (Splatoon) and I've been using fly.io for it. Being able to run it in multiple regions is useful for this in my opinion because the Splatoon community isn't just concentrated in one place, it's all over. If I hosted in the US then players from Japan would suffer and vice versa. Even if this little project doesn't go anywhere, I still see it as a (probably) rather useful experience for someday when I'm like, out of school and stuff. It's really neat to learn about I think. Right now I have it running in the Eastern US, Amsterdam, and Tokyo for about $10/month.
pphysch 3y ago
It's the age old conundrum where every other startup presumes they will hit "Google-scale" and therefore needs the latest shiny Google-scale architecture from day 1, whether that is K8s, SPA, GraphQL, or edge deployments. Sell spades during a gold rush.
esafak 3y ago
It means you can pick them without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales.

theossuary 3y ago

Is there any interest in working with telcos to manage MECs? It seems like they've finally given up on building their own container orchestration, and are now looking at Google's GDCE & Amazon's Outpost. But those fundamentally aren't good models for MEC. I could definitely see a really interesting future for Fly where you're building tech to actively follow users between towers to provide the lowest possible latency to apps.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

It's gonna be a sad day when they get bought by a larger company and this writing style is crushed by corporate monotony.

philipwhiuk 3y ago
See also the Match Group moment for the OkCupid blog, the Oracle moment for Renesys/DynResearch.

mirchiseth 3y ago

Razing money or not as a self proclaimed PaaS geek I have always enjoyed reading fly.io blogs. Two of my favorites are How they run containers as VMs [1] and How they outgrew Hashicorp Nomad and wrote their own scheduler [2] [1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] - https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/ https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...

ignoramous 3y ago
The serverless server by Will Jordan is one of the best biztech posts I've read in the past few years: https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/ https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/

tl 3y ago

Minor nit: > The kind of platform company we want to be hasn’t changed since 2020. Our features are all generally a command or two in flyctl, and they work for any app that can packaged in a container. can be packaged

nickstinemates 3y ago

I am a big fan of the next gen heroku competitors. At the top of the list are fly.io and railway.app.

robertlagrant 3y ago

I'm in health tech and one killer feature would be being able to route and store an individual's requests through and data in a particular location. So I can deploy a health app backend that allows its users to decide where to put their data.

thomasfortes 3y ago
Something like this: https://fly.io/docs/reference/dynamic-request-routing/#the-fly-prefer-region-request-header https://fly.io/docs/reference/dynamic-request-routing/#the-f...? You probably would have to handle a lot of the logic by yourself for privacy and security reason, but I think this is a nice primitive to start from.

sriram_sun 3y ago

I really like the "Here's what's not changing" section. Honorable mention for Twilio. Also, the kind of platform companies where you sign up and play tend to get acquired and become the kind where you sign up and a sales person calls you!

ericghildyal 3y ago
I've been going through the sales gauntlet lately for a new company I'm working on, and it's ROUGH! I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been written.

turbobooster 3y ago

[dead]

dorongrinstein 3y ago

Fly.io marketing is top notch. Unlike fly.io, https://controlplane.com https://controlplane.com lets you run at the edge, super easily but on any compute substrate, not just on one vendor's (Equinix). Your own machines, your own AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Hetzner, Linode, Contabo, etc. accounts, or on Control Plane's many locations in all clouds. On Control Plane you instantly define a "Global Virtual Cloud" made up of any location you specify (your own, or ours, or both). You get a GLOBAL endpoint where a customer in NY gets a response from aws-us-east2 for example, and a customer in L.A. gets a response from aws-us-west2 for example. Of course, AWS is just one of many locations you get run compute on. We're about to release a multi-master Postgres offering and unlike Fly.io, we're 100% K8s, but if you don't know a thing about K8s, you're in luck. You don't need to know a thing about Kubernetes. You simply get secrets management, logs, metrics, tracing, alerting, mutual TLS between services, service discovery, software defined VPN between locations, private link support, direct connect support, your unlimited logs, metrics, audit trail all included and military grade fine-grained access control, audit trail and extreme cost optimization - you pay by the millicore of CPU and MB of RAM. The best part is that you can mix-n-match ANY of the services of AWS, GCP and Azure (Big Table, RDS, DynamoDB, Active Directory, S3, etc.) and not deal with IAM (identity & access management) complexity. Never deal with credentials and go from code --> unbreakable TLS endpoint in 30 seconds. If AWS goes down your endpoint is humming along. You get all the control, without the pain. If you are already a K8s expert and have Helm charts, CRDs, controllers and other existing compute artifacts, we support you out of the box. If you don't know cloud-native - that is OK: just check in your code, the platform containerizes it for you and BOOM - you get a TLS endpoint (with your own domain) and you'll never hear things like "the certificate expired, prometheus fell over, vault needs to be upgraded, we need a new version of Istio, etc.". I urge you to see a demo because a talking about it and seeing it are completely different things. Feel free to visit https://controlplane.com https://controlplane.com and I promise you will be shocked in a good way. Doron, CEO of Control Plane Corporation.

ignoramous 3y ago
Congratulations, CP looks neat. I am compelled to point out, I am mostly shocked by the lack of paragraphs.

deleted 3y ago

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miahwilde 3y ago

Here's what we believed in 2023: people want solutions they can understand in two hours. Here's what everyone actually wanted to talk about: Trust. Here's what we missed: ...

carlosbaraza 3y ago

Edge computing is definitely the last way hosting providers have found to vendor lock you in. Many companies like 37Signals realize that all the fancy cloud provider services have a huge cost because they literally hold you hostage to the mercy of their pricing teams. In a time of high interest rates, I deeply value our commitment to open source container solutions. The only thing we can't do at the moment is to spin an edge network; that's their mote, and why keep doubling down on edge. They double down regardless of knowing most apps top performance offenders don't include the latency to the end user. The bookstore they mention in the article would be much better off deploying all containers in a single cheap commoditized VPS with docker compose, that'd reduce latency between services, and then they can concentrate on optimizing their app and their DB queries. Don't waste time in saving a few milliseconds between your server and the end user, opening a massive can of worms that includes distributed databases, complex infrastructure, vendor lock in, and many other issues they'd happily charge you for. I wrote a simple library to deploy with docker compose that includes logging, metrics, and a few other utils. https://lostdock.com https://lostdock.com

consultSKI 3y ago

Okay, help me here... with Dockers why would I want to go back to VMs?

moneywoes 3y ago

For the uninitiated, what does Fly do that Amazon does not through AWS?