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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 t

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
      Yes, with a big disclaimer that "this is not managed Postgres" [1] and a list of alternatives at the end. As a hobbyist building a small website for fun, I took the hint and chose one of those. You get to choose a region for your database, so now I'm thinking about how I want to deal with that. [1] https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should-know/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should...

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
    Yes, with a big disclaimer that "this is not managed Postgres" [1] and a list of alternatives at the end. As a hobbyist building a small website for fun, I took the hint and chose one of those. You get to choose a region for your database, so now I'm thinking about how I want to deal with that. [1] https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should-know/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should...