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Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

(christine.website)
528 points sealeck | 10 comments | 15 May 22 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.292s | source | bottom
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anon3949494 ◴[15 May 22 21:10 UTC] No.31391163[source]▶
After all the chatter this week, I've come to the conclusion that Heroku froze at the perfect time for my 4 person company. All of these so called "features" are exactly what we don't want or need.

1. Multi-region deployment only work if your database is globally distributed too. However, making your database globally distributed creates a set of new problems, most of which take time away from your core business.

2. File persistence is fine but not typically necessary. S3 works just fine.

It's easy to forget that most companies are a handful of people or just solo devs. At the same time, most money comes from the enterprise, so products that reach sufficient traction tend to shift their focus to serving the needs of these larger clients.

I'm really glad Heroku froze when it did. Markets always demand growth at all costs, and I find it incredibly refreshing that Heroku ended up staying in its lane. IMO it was and remains the best PaaS for indie devs and small teams.

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1. twblalock ◴[15 May 22 21:46 UTC] No.31391460[source]▶
Even small companies should be multi-region, if they care about uptime.
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2. tomnipotent ◴[15 May 22 21:57 UTC] No.31391549[source]▶
No, they shouldn't. In many instances it's cheaper to tolerate downtime than to pay to avoid it, especially when there's no SLA involved.
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3. treeman79 ◴[15 May 22 22:08 UTC] No.31391624[source]▶
Most of the time. If heroku is having downtime. Then Amazon is having downtime. Then half the internet is down. Let customers know Amazon is down. Sit back and relax.
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4. tomnipotent ◴[15 May 22 22:23 UTC] No.31391737{3}[source]▶
Uptime isn't an axiom. Most software isn't mission critical and most users won't notice if it's down for 30 minutes once or twice a month, and for everything else we have SLA's to manage professional expectations.
5. nosvince ◴[15 May 22 22:27 UTC] No.31391762{3}[source]▶
Wow, that's a horrible way of thinking about the user experience. And honestly, I'm not surprised. That's why companies that really care about the user experience will always steal market share from those that don't.
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6. ceejayoz ◴[15 May 22 22:31 UTC] No.31391788[source]▶
Very few companies have uptime requirements so critical they can justify this. Small companies with limited ops resources may struggle to make a multi-region setup work more reliably than a single-region one.
7. neojebfkekeej ◴[15 May 22 22:44 UTC] No.31391883{4}[source]▶
It’s actually small companies that care about user experience that will often make these trade-offs. Less time managing multi-cloud deployments means more time spent building our core product and talking to users.
8. ◴[15 May 22 22:51 UTC] No.31391940{4}[source]▶
9. jen20 ◴[16 May 22 01:01 UTC] No.31392765[source]▶
Often for small companies with limited resources, the act of trying to make something multi region has the effect of making the overall system less correct and less reliable than just running in a single region.
10. strken ◴[16 May 22 04:21 UTC] No.31393656{4}[source]▶
On the one hand, yeah it sucks. On the other hand, my local ice-cream shop was closed for 30 minutes last week because the owner was doing something and the staff member who was rostered on was out sick. If your online business is at the same level of profit and necessity as an ice-cream shop, it can probably close for 30 minutes once or twice a year.