Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

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.

Hot take: if people spent half the energy doing multi-region that they today spend screwing around with Kubernetes, they’d be a hell of a lot more reliable.

I think people misconstrue the benefits of k8s to be related to reliability or similar. Ultimately it's about the API and the consistency and productivity it offers.

For larger teams having a well defined API that delineates applications from infrastructure that doesn't require extreme specialist knowledge (it still requires some specialist knowledge but vastly less than direct manipulation of resources via something like Terraform) is a massive productivity boost.

Of course none of that matters if you have 4 developers like OP but for folks like myself that routinely end up at places with 300+ engineers then it's a huge deal.

> I think people misconstrue the benefits of k8s to be related to reliability or similar. Ultimately it's about the API and the consistency and productivity it offers

I think this is the first time I've heard somebody say one of the benefits of kubernetes was productivity.

Really? I think it's a pretty obvious benefit. If you bundle something into a container, you can probably run it in kubernetes. This uniformity makes it incredibly easy to deploy and scale new applications.

The same is true of ECS, but with a much simpler API, much tighter integration with load balancers, a no-charge control plane, and not having to upgrade every cluster every 3-6 months.

I’ve had 2 services running flawlessly in ecs for over a year (with load balancing) without having to touch them. Took me all of 15m to set them up. It’s quite good.

Fargate is really nice too—it takes the benefits of ECS even further to the point that the underlying EC2 instances are abstracted away almost completely.

Fargate with auto-scaling plus Aurora for the DB is pretty great in terms of a nearly zero-maintenance setup that can handle just about any type of service up to massive scale.

Unfortunately getting all the networking and IAM stuff right is still pretty thorny if you want to do things the correct way and not just run it all in public subnets. And the baseline costs are significantly higher than a paas.