Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

Fly has a nice DX but unfortunately the platform still has major issues with reliability and networking. There are often problems with deploys leading to stuck and unreachable instances or other networking issues. It's probably exacerbated by the new user growth but the slick deploy workflow can't override having an app that works.

Render and others are interesting but K8S is still fundamentally better considering all the DX progress there making it pretty easy to get a container running in a cluster.

What exactly makes K8s better?

Definitely not the developer experience.

But as it is often mentioend, as companies and apps grow, so do their requirements and the need for flexibility. I can't think of a more flexible deployment target that handles a lot of the PaaS concerns than Kubernetes, warts and all.

Fly is surprisingly great, volumes + containers is very close to universal for a PaaS, but it certainly can't cover everything that is running in my workplace's kubernetes.

It's basically the platform to build platforms like these (and some of them already run on it).

K8S offers the same primitives and more, with progressive complexity as you need it. You can deploy a single container with a 1-line command or an entire PaaS subsystem. It's also more portable than any single platform and you can run it on a few VPS instances or your own bare metal. I've also found it far more reliable than all these PaaS services that have their own issues with no visibility.

K8S experience is also more valuable and useful in future projects and there are plenty of nice DX tooling to make deploys easy if that's the blocker.

I’d be very surprised if any edge compute systems run on (a single) K8s cluster. In nearly all cases you’d run at least a cluster per region. K8s also provides no functionality for per region routing or networking between clusters.

That is to say, for most of what fly gives you there is no K8s equivalent.

None of them run on a single cluster globally. That's not supported or recommended by anyone. Some PaaS do use K8S as an underlying orchestrator for workloads, the same way Fly uses Hashicorp's Nomad, with multiple clusters per region.

Kubernetes does have federation/multi-cluster abilities, and global routing/load balancing is available from every CDN and cloud. It's more work to setup but not by that much.