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For what it’s worth, I left Fly because of this crap. At first my Fly machine web app had intermittent connection issues to a new production PG machine. Then my
by mrcwinn 3y ago
For what it’s worth, I left Fly because of this crap. At first my Fly machine web app had intermittent connection issues to a new production PG machine. Then my PG machine died. Hard. I lost all data. A restart didn’t work - it could not recover. I restored an older backup over at RDS and couldn’t be happier I left.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI left digitalocean for fly because some of their tooling was excellent. I was pretty excited. I’m back on digitalocean now. I’m not unhappy about it, they’re very solid. I don’t love some things about their services, but overall I’d highly recommend them to other developers. I gave up on fly because I’d spontaneously be unable to automate deployments due to limited resources. Or I’d have previously happy deployments go missing with no automatic recovery. I didn’t realize this was happening to a number of my services until I started monitoring with 3rd party tools, and it became evident that I really couldn’t rely on them. It’s a shame because I do like a lot of other things about them. Even for hobby work it didn’t seem worth the trouble. With digitalocean, everything “just works”. There’s no free tier, but the lower end of pricing means I can run several Go apps off of the same droplet for less than the price of a latte. It’s worth the sanity.
- danielvaughn 3y agoI adore DO. They’re seriously underrated. I love how they’ll just give you a server and say here, have at it. No abstractions, no fancy crap, just get out of my way and let me do my thing.
- eduction 3y agoI went to DO's site due to your comment and I don't see anywhere where I can just get a server. Do you mean a VPS/Droplet? (I'm looking under Products and Solutions.)
- gregsadetsky 3y agoNot GP, but yes -- Droplets are DigitalOcean's "servers" (virtual, but nonetheless). You boot one up in less than 30 seconds, and get ssh access to it almost immediately. It's very BS-free.
- danielvaughn 3y agoThe other commenter was correct - I meant a droplet. Should have been more explicit, apologies. But yeah if you're looking to learn how to work with backends, going through a droplet set up is by far the best way to get started IMO.
- justsid 3y agoI wish I could say the same. My ISP and DO have absolutely terrible peering, unfortunately a lot of our internal stuff is hosted there. It’s always fun to git push/pull with 40kb/s on a gigabit connection.
- masklinn 3y agoMaybe you could VPN to or proxy through a box with good peering to you and DO?
- aidos 3y agoWhen I’ve run into this in the past Cloudflare Warp has been a bit of a saviour. It’s a hassle free way to flick a switch and follow a different path over the network.
- abwizz 3y agowow! sub mbps indicates that there is indeed no peering at all (political issues?) but just a transit connection via an overloaded carryall. collect some evidence, maybe someone wants to do something about it.
- JanSt 3y agoI'm using Digital Ocean App platform, which does pretty much everything for me. It's very simple to use. I can run my app as a single developer without caring about infrastructure for 99% of the time.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoDo they offer authentication/authorization? This is the one thing I need in every app and don't want to do myself.
- spacebanana7 3y agoI've been using Supabase for authentication/authorization in my recent side project. The main app is node/express running on Digital Ocean and it connects to directly to the Supabase hosted Postgres for most operations, but then uses the Supabase auth API for auth related stuff. Saves a lot of time sending password reset emails etc and the entire project costs less than $5/mo in hosting costs.
- okhuman 3y agoWould you consider a project like https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2 for the authentication side? Missing anything?
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoNo I would not. I don't like self hosting anything that requires its own process. And if I did decide to self host I would choose a more mature project. This is a very young one man project delegating the heavy lifting to another one man project. And it doesn't appear to support social logins.
- okhuman 3y agothanks for the feedback.
- 3y ago
- vasco 3y agoSame! I've had my first server there for 10 years now. They added a lot of stuff in the meantime, they have AWS-like things you can do. But in terms of launching a VM that just works, they are a great choice.
- danielvaughn 3y agoYeah I hadn't seen those newer features until recently, the one-click deployments are super cool.
- yard2010 3y agoI love their high value content about dev ops, I have learned most of what I know in this field tinkering with a VPS with their great tutorials on how to set up stuff.
- brightball 3y agoThey filled the Slicehost vacuum nicely in this area. That's where I got my start in running my own servers about 15 years ago and the tutorials were the driving factor.
- xp84 3y agoSeriously! They have an amazing article I followed one time to set up a k8s cluster to run any container I wanted with full automatic ssl provisioning/management and dns. Make a quick little yml file that includes what subdomain it wants to be and kubectl apply. The cluster was like $100 a month all-in and performed like a beast at huge traffic levels, and all I did was follow a tutorial. I know that’s probably pretty easy for many, but I was pretty new to k8s and it felt like magic.
- dbingham 3y agoI love DO for projects where I don't need control. For my side project, I eventually migrated to AWS after running into a lot of issues with DO. Things like they don't give you the postgres root user on their managed postgres. And I ran into issues trying to capture the deployments in code. Their terraform providers are pretty good, but still leave something to be desired. For all its many warts, I'm much happier back on AWS. It did end up more expensive, but it's worth it for the fine grained control in my case. But I spent the last 5 years as a DevOps/SRE, so... uh... I'm picky.
- danielvaughn 3y agoThat's interesting, because granular control is why I enjoy DO, although I'm thinking about it from the server perspective. They set up a machine, give me root access, and that's literally it. I set up my own ssh keys, firewalls, and there's no additional abstraction that I have to learn. I might just be reminiscing because right now I'm on a team where we're writing terraform/helm/k8s in GCP and it makes me want to cry myself to sleep each night lol.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThose are good things to know. I’ve been wondering about their managed databases recently, so I’ll keep that in mind. I’m nowhere near as picky as you are, but maybe I’ll need to be at some point. As it is I mostly just build stuff and send it to the internet. If it builds and it does what I expected, I’m pretty happy! I don’t often need anything too special.
- bjord 3y agohistorically, I've used Vultr, but I don't see anyone talking about it—I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on them? (I've been happy, but then again my usage has been exceedingly basic)
- tedchs 3y agoI've used Vultr for several years (hobby projects) with no issues. My favorite feature is having a BGP session from my VM, which is unusual among cloud providers. I have an AS and am able to advertise my own IPs from multiple Vultr instances (anycast).
- LtdJorge 3y agoHow do you get an AS?
- creeble 3y agoHave used both DO and Vultr for years. Put simply, DO is better, but Vultr isn’t terrible. Higher number of outages at Vultr over 5 years, but none longer than a few hours. I can’t remember the last DO outage lasting more than a few minutes. Experienced a Vultr routing problem that lasted several hours; they communicated about it, but it was still a long time to fix. DO once did an auto-migration of a server to another cluster with an attendant outage that lasted a few minutes at most. No IP changes, completely transparent.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI agree. I can either abstract with the app platform or kubernetes, or I can go straight into the box myself and do whatever needs doing. It has been a real pleasure. I think fly’s tooling feels better than doctl, but the infrastructure is incomparable at the end of the day. doctl has improved over time too, and with added pressure from newcomers I don’t doubt that it’ll continue to improve.
- apple4ever 3y agoI really love DO except for one thing - you can't run your own firewall/router there (like opnSense). Really hard to link systems together.
- michaelcampbell 3y agoI find myself going to DO docs on various setup things even when I'm not using said thing on DO (although I'm also a DO customer, and love them for the reasons you've stated).
- NicoJuicy 3y agoI moved from DO to Hetzner ( cheaper), I am happy about it.
- x86hacker1010 3y agoSame here
- brylie 3y agoI'm enjoying the DO App Platform (Heroku alternative). Do you know if Hetzner has a similar service that I could compare?
- hardwaresofton 3y agoHey I'm building a managed service platform (not quite an app store!) on top of Hetzner -- would you be interested in trying it out? Contact is in my profile but I'd love to have some more people kick the tires and tell me what they want built the most.
- realusername 3y agoPersonally I just install Dokku onto the machine, it replaced all my Heroku (and competitors) uses. Additionally, you still keep the full ssh access to the machine if you ever need it.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoDoes anyone know how Hetzner pricing is half of DO yet is profitable, while DO is loss making with 6% operating margin?
- stevefan1999 3y agoSimple, Hetzner mainly operates on Germany, the people are mostly Germans, and they automate the stuff to a point a small team could manage it well even if not remotely, so they have less cost on human resources.
- graypegg 3y agoDO actually does have a free tier! If you use their “app platform” (their equivalent to fly/heroku/render/etc) you can host 3 “static” apps for free. So if you have a Hugo/Jekyll blog or something, it’ll set up a whole little CD system for it for free.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoYou’re totally right. I kind of forgot about this, in part because I’m over their free limit. I think their static sites are still dirt cheap once you hit that limit, though. I find their pricing totally reasonable for what I need.
- no_wizard 3y agoI'm a fan of Linode as well. I want to like Fly, but the reliability is one of those were I feel like every time I investigate moving workloads over I'm disappointed by these stories over and over again.
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- pier25 3y agoSo you didn't have a HA setup with multiple machines and volumes?
- nerpderp82 3y agoIs that even possible on Fly?
- fmajid 3y agoHe may have been talking about Fly themselves. Certainly having only a single machine to serve a wealthy metropolis of 8 million people seems like amateur hour.
- nerpderp82 3y agoFly sounds like they need some Conway's Law. A front end that designs the nice api and works on developer affordances and the backend that keeps it running and reliable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sanswork 3y agoThey certainly don't only have a single machine in SYD since I have a bunch of machines running in SYD that we're impacted by this one.
- bongobingo1 3y ago> machine to serve a wealthy metropolis of 8 million It's actually the only region to serve the entire AU and NZ population with any reasonable latency. (Ok, Singapore can do in a pinch for at least sub 200ms.) You'd wanna hope its more than one machine!
- tptacek 3y agoObviously, we have a bunch of machines, both workers and edge servers, in Sydney. The whole Sydney region didn't go down; one worker did.
- quickthrower2 3y agoFly is in my “try later book” from a year or two ago. I remember it was hard to deploy anything due to downtime so gave up. Sad that stuff like this still happens. You shouldn’t need to multi region a postgres yourself - they should have at least 2 data centre redundancy for the region and it just works. Hope they get some magic sauce to become better at this.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago> Hope they get some magic sauce to become better at this. When I saw them describe their multiregion SQL replication architecture I thought "what crazy person thought this wouldn't eventually open up a spider's nest of distributed systems errors?"
- api 3y agoCockroachDB does this, but that's the result of over 10 years of heads down hard-ass engineering and it's still slower than Postgres because distributed sync is not free. That means you have to provision it properly and with enough resources. Their license would require a company like fly.io to pay them though, so I'm sure this resulted in fly.io instead trying to whip up an improvised infrastructure on the back of stock Postgres. I bet this cost them a whole lot more than paying CockroachDB would have, but devs have been conditioned that you should never ever pay for software even if it's the result of tons of deep engineering and solves massive brutal problems for you. I also bet there's some not-invented-here ego involved. P.S. I don't work for CDB but I would absolutely consider them and we may end up using them at some point. They let you do a ton for free. They only charge for stuff you need if you get really really huge or if you are running a SaaS reselling DB services like fly.io would have been doing.
- tptacek 3y agoOur multiregion SQL replication architecture is the standard Postgres multiregion replication architecture. We do single-write-leader, multiple reader replicas, like everybody else does.
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