Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

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.

You'd still be sending writes to a single region (leader). If the leader is located across the world from the request's origin, there will be a significant latency. Not to mention you need to wait for that write to replicate across the world before it becomes generally available.

HTTP requests that write to the DB are basically the same speed as "Heroku, but in one place". If you're building infrastructure for all the full stack devs you can target, this is a good way to do it.

Distributing write heavy work loads is an application architecture problem. You can do it with something like CockroachDB, but you have to model your data specifically to solve that problem. We have maybe 5 customers who've made that leap.

In our experience, people get a huge boost from read replicas without needing to change their app (or learn to model data for geo-distribution).