Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

I could relate to the comment on Redis.

  The only things I can see missing are automated Redis hosting by the platform.

There have been so many times I wanted some simple key value store which I do not have to bother about setting up and taking care of. Something like "ambient Redis". It's OK not to have crazy scaling promises. You just enable an API (maybe for a small fee) and just use it.

If and when you get big enough you switch to a setup you bother about setting up and taking care of.

Am I making sense to anyone?

Fly did have a built-in redis cache (albeit multi-tenant / shared) and for the life of me I can't figure out why they'd deprecate it (though, it still works): https://community.fly.io/t/debugging-a-failing-image-without... and https://community.fly.io/t/please-bring-redis-back/1563

If anything, I'd prefer they moved their PaaS more towards serverless and managed offerings than towards IaaS.

Perhaps just using an embedded DB would be better in your case? Something like Berkeley DB. Alternatively, just Dockerize it, although I assume it's too much upkeep.

While not as "Redis-y", there are some decent KV-ish managed databases out there:

- Firestore - Cloudflare Workers KV - DynamoDB - Bigtable

On their forums they say they envision some other company handling Postgres too. Personally I would prefer they handle the databases, redis etc because that way the services you need can be provisioned right alongside your app servers otherwise it undermines the value of having edge servers near your users. Heroku could get away with 3rd parties being responsible for the database software because using AWS it was easy for other companies to be in the same region or zone.

https://community.fly.io/t/can-we-get-an-update-on-managed-d...

Same.

My money is on Supabase building for Fly as a target / default IaaS, and that's as much close to managed services we are going to get, given Fly's insistence that they're not really good at (or want to) building (and maintaining) managed services.

I've been really loving Upstash's Redis offering. Scales down to $0/month and for my needs (1-3 ops per second) even their high availability Redis ends up being just a few bucks a month. Probably cheaper and certainly easier than spinning a simple instance up on my own, but with performance and uptime guarantees closer to one of the cloud managed Redis offerings which start at mid to high $10s per month

One GCP Firestore tip a lot of folks don't realize for non-client-WebSocket-y workloads you can run Firestore in Datastore mode and it acts much more like DynamoDB. Can turn usage bills from $10s per month to pennies, and IIRC gives you faster response times and higher scaling limits in terms of writes per second

I was in the exact same spot (only on render.com), where Redis seemed overkill, but a key-value store was needed.

So I created a Postgres Key Value Ruby library. https://github.com/berkes/postgres_key_value

Anything can be a key/value store and there are dozens of managed databases with serverless pricing and public/HTTP access so you can use it anywhere with acceptable latency.