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Fly.io seems to be a bit of a mixed bag: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917436 https://news.ycombinator.
by cryptos 2y ago
Fly.io seems to be a bit of a mixed bag:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41917436
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044516
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742946
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34229751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34229751
If a cloud platform doesn't really provide reliability, I'd say it's probably not worth it. You could better just rent a (virtual) server and save the cloud tax.
- qeternity 2y agoI don't really understand the value prop of fly.io. They seem to have an impressive engineering team despite the outages, but is edge compute really something that 99.9% of devs need? There are tons of large companies that operate out of a single AWS region and those services are used by millions around the globe. It just strikes me as something that enables premature optimization right out of the box.
- jrockway 2y agoI would take edge compute if it's free and easy. That's fly.io's value prop. In a world where much web browsing starts with ACK SYN ACK, it is nice if the server is close to you.
- k__ 2y agoIt's basically the new Heroku with less lock-in, because it works with Docker. You get edge computing, autoscaling, and load balancing without additional configuration. Not as flexible as AWS, but also much easier to setup and maintain. But the reliability issues suck now and then.
- nikodotio 2y agoThis is precisely it. The ease of deploy, https domain configuration, scaling. Additionally, having machines that turn off when not in use is easy to configure, which I never managed on AWS.
- ignoramous 2y ago> which I never managed on AWS I haven't looked at it recently, but App Runner could do a few of Fly.io esque things (but slightly more expensive): https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/ https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/
- ignoramous 2y ago> Not as flexible as AWS Today, Fly.io is more or less in the same market as Lightsail, not AWS. And when you compare it to Lightsail, it blows it away.
- mtlynch 2y agoAnd when you compare it to Lightsail, it blows it away. This is a bit of a confusing sentence because there are so many pronouns. Do all of the "it"s refer to Fly.io?
- dijksterhuis 2y ago> And when you compare [fly.io] to Lightsail, [fly.io] blows [Lightsail] away.
- watermelon0 2y agoDid you count reliability into your assesment here? I'm reading about Fly.io outages multiple times a year, whereas Lightsail seem to be as stable as AWS EC2.
- gurgunday 2y agoDigitalOcean has been doing this for years, and their value proposition is unmatched IMO For $5 you get: Latest gen CPUs and RAM HTTPS DDoS protection Cloudflare CDN Autoscale Competent support I'd say the best part is the predictable monthly prices And while most people probably don't care, they are an established public company, so there is more chance they will exist in 10 years
- dijksterhuis 2y agoare global r/w token permissions still a thing, or did the token scopes thing finally come out of beta? also, my experience with support was not the same as yours. they were utterly useless for the most part. for a personal web dev (or similar) project, like, i agree, they’ve got good value. but having worked in a small biz where DO was what they built everything on — no. bad idea. spend more. use aws (graviton ec2 instances)/azure.
- fragmede 2y agothe $5 droplet is underpowered and can't run anything substantial. it's just the price to get you in the door.
- yabones 2y agoIt doesn't really need to run anything "substantial" though. Running some janky wordpress site with some scabbed-on ecommerce customizations is like 50% of the internet.
- infecto 2y agoa 1vCPU 512mb instance is plenty for most base cases. Maybe you need one additional machine to act as a background worker. I am sure there are some noisy neighbors but to say its underpowered is silly.
- fragmede 2y agoI'm calling it underpowered because the $5 one had trouble running my custom ssh daemon. ssh! the cryptography for that shouldn't chug down the server I'm renting from them. a bigger instance from them isn't having the same problems.
- infecto 2y agoI have asked this multiple times but is anyone really using edge compute and getting value out of it? I am certain there are cases but I have not seen any of them written up before.
- pier25 2y agoWe have an embeddable audio player served globally with very low latency. This wouldn't be possible without edge compute/data.
- sofixa 2y agoDepends on what you mean by edge compute, but you probably are. 5G towers are a ton of compute on the edge to secure and protect the traffic passing through them. Or if by edge you mean having stuff close to your consumers, every non trivial operation does that.
- infecto 2y agoHow is it not obvious based on the thread at hand, fly.io. And no not every nontrivial operation does it to the extreme of an envisioned fly.io deployment.
- victorbjorklund 2y agoIf half your customers are in new your and half in sidney it makes you app faster if you run it in both places. There is a lot of things we do for our users that we don't need (no one "needs" SPA etc). But if it is easy to make your app faster for your users, why not?
- victorbjorklund 2y agoAnd it is easier than AWS to deploy.
- brainzap 2y agoI typed fly launch, fly deploy and my node.js project was deployed. So I guess hobby projects?
- austinpena 2y agoI have an SSR Astro project. Using Fly makes my project fast. For dynamic data I use SWR. I could use Cloudflare workers but it doesn’t play so nice with Astro. I also have a “form submission service” where I receive a Post and send an email. I need maximum uptime to avoid revenue loss. It’s a go service so I deploy ~6 machines across the US to ensure I don’t drop any requests. I haven’t had downtime in years.
- infecto 2y agoI am going to go out on a limb and say there is no real value prop to fly.io. I could completely be wrong but it always feels like the modern MongoDB. Everyone wants to use it but I am not sure they are extracting value from it and instead its a shiny toy that is fun to build from.
- huijzer 2y agoFor experiments and hobby projects the value proposition is amazing. Where else can you spin up an independent instance for $1.94 per month?* *Note this is for an instance with only 256MB RAM (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/), but it's definitely possible to run non-trivial projects on that. Rust-based web servers like Rocket require only about 10MB RAM. Basic PHP servers should also fit from what I can find.
- hobo_mark 2y agoOne such microVM per month used to be within the free monthly allowance, is that not the case anymore?
- oefrha 2y agoThere are plenty of better deals as long as you don’t limit yourself to big clouds and clouds with startup-esque landing pages frequently posted to HN. LowEndTalk may be the most well-known place for finding such deals. (Not saying the typical cheap VPS on LowEndTalk has comparable PaaS features. Only responding to parent’s use case of a single cheap instance.)
- belter 2y agoSounds like a Lambda function....
- input_sh 2y agoNowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings? You can easily get 4 GB of RAM for $5 from the likes of Hetzner or Hostinger, so that's 16x more RAM for 2.5x the price. One relatively unknown provider I have used in the past offers 2 GB of RAM for €3.6/month (if paid monthly, €3 if anually), so 8x more RAM for 1.5-2x the price. I'm sure I could find something even cheaper, but I'm just looking at providers I have personally used. BTW that dropdown seems to be sorted cheapest > most expensive. If you go to the bottom of the list the price for that same VPS doubles.
- KomoD 2y ago> Nowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings? There's definitely places that offer it... also 512m I know because I've personally bought such plans and that was $5-10/yr because I didn't need dedicated ipv4.
- akoculu 2y agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36808296
- zackify 2y agoThe reliability is very very bad. It was really insane that 2 times in the past few months the main dashboard was down as I’m demoing something. Not to mention the deploy outages and almost daily some random thing was unavailable or delayed. I had to leave a few months ago after the price raises and how many times my boss saw some issue in the project I had with them. They also deprecated and removed their sqlite backup service. Back to GCP and not worrying about so many outages now.
- pc86 2y agoNow just to worry about GCP getting shut down with a few days' notice. /s But in all seriousness the gall to raise prices before actually fixing the reliability problems is pretty shocking. I understand it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing where you maybe are tight on resources but there's no scenario where it's acceptable to have a product with these kinds of problems and then raise prices on existing customers who are putting up with it.
- pajeetz 2y agotheres just so many anecdotes/nightmare stories from people using fly.io here much more than the ones linked by GP expect to see more of these "post-mortem apologies" from fly.io in the future because it won't be the last
- tptacek 2y agoYou're right. It won't. Nobody could claim otherwise.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pajeetz 2y agofly.io has a very bad reputation for reliability there doesn't seem to be any damage control beyond hackernews and even here the consensus seems to be "dont run anything mission critical on fly.io or expect data redundancy" in fact, you can almost get the same thing fly.io does by running firecracker on your own bare metal servers and cheaper too. I'm afraid the public sentiment towards fly.io has been tainted for good (I can't count how many times they apologized now).
- tptacek 2y agoThis is the second place you've offered this sentiment. Was it your expectation that we were going to hit some point, sometime in the near future, where we weren't going to have deployment-blocking outages? I'd like to better understand your premise. If it's "I can get more reliability by deploying on a hyperscaler cloud", who ever told you otherwise?
- pajeetz 2y agoI see so you think its good business practice to basically say "expect more downtimes in the future who cares about your entire business going down for several hours more than once a year. Gotcha. I'll be sure to pass on the good word.
- ARCarr 2y agoI tried out Fly.io and deployed a little test app. I couldn't even access the app, because they put it onto a server that was under "emergency maintenance" and had been that way for twelve days.
- tptacek 2y agoThis is a completely sane way to look at the world and we won't push back on it at all. We're building something extraordinarily difficult, and we're a relatively new company, and we don't have even a fraction of the resources the hyperscalers do, or, in the cases of AWS, GCP, and OCI, had at the time they started. If you're minmaxing for reliability --- which is an absolutely sane way to play --- we're not going to tell you you'd do worse in 2024 UE1. If it helps: all sorts of things can and do go wrong, but the most likely form of disruption you're likely to see here are periods of times when deployments don't work. This outage was a deployments/orchestration outage. We had a total request routing outage several months back, owing to a Rust concurrency landmine we stepped on, but those are very rare. (Deployment and state-update outages are a big deal, and if you deploy to diverse groups of Fly Machines constantly, as we encourage you to do, that being one of the big features of the platform, they can impact your availability. I'm not downplaying them.)