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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 alway

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.
- logifail 3y ago
  > without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales ... except "once it scales", you realise that you're paying through the nose for cloud services "because growth", so you end up looking at on-prem again, and finally decide it's better value?
  - esafak 3y ago
    At that scale you have discounted multi-year agreements. It's a good problem to have.

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.

logifail 3y ago
> without worrying about whether your startup will have to migrate once it scales ... except "once it scales", you realise that you're paying through the nose for cloud services "because growth", so you end up looking at on-prem again, and finally decide it's better value?
- esafak 3y ago
  At that scale you have discounted multi-year agreements. It's a good problem to have.