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1226 points bishopsmother | 18 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source | bottom
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samwillis ◴[] No.35046486[source]
Fundamentally I think some of the problems come down to the difference between what Fly set out to build and what the market currently want.

Fly (to my understanding) at its core is about edge compute. That is where they started and what the team are most excited about developing. It's a brilliant idea, they have the skills and expertise. They are going to be successful at it.

However, at the same time the market is looking for a successor to Heroku. A zero dev ops PAAS with instant deployment, dirt simple managed Postgres, generous free level of service, lower cost as you scale, and a few regions around the world. That isn't what Fly set out to do... exactly, but is sort of the market they find themselves in when Heroku then basically told its low value customers to go away.

It's that slight miss alignment of strategy and market fit that results in maybe decisions being made that benefit the original vision, but not necessarily the immediate influx of customers.

I don't envy the stress the Fly team are under, but what an exciting set of problems they are trying to solve, I do envy that!

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vineyardmike ◴[] No.35046650[source]
I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1.

I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one off hand.

What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl (and workflow) for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

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1. latchkey ◴[] No.35046719[source]
> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

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2. 0cf8612b2e1e ◴[] No.35046766[source]
If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.
replies(2): >>35046965 #>>35048365 #
3. mattbillenstein ◴[] No.35046789[source]
Do you have a guide in mind?

If it's sorting and sifting and clicking a bunch of stuff in the console, that's not painfully simple. If it's some easy cli commands, I think that's in the ballpark...

replies(1): >>35051333 #
4. monsieurbanana ◴[] No.35046965[source]
I'm not using gcp anymore because it's not worth risk losing access to my personal gmail account just to play around with pet projects.

I might be paranoid, but I just don't feel comfortable when there's so much in play.

replies(2): >>35047181 #>>35047987 #
5. guhcampos ◴[] No.35047181{3}[source]
Create a new Gmail account?
replies(2): >>35047979 #>>35048039 #
6. vineyardmike ◴[] No.35047979{4}[source]
Google associates different accounts that are from the same owner when handling issues FYI. So if they think your account is doing something wrong on GCP, be wary of associated accounts.
replies(1): >>35051330 #
7. 0cf8612b2e1e ◴[] No.35047987{3}[source]
Totally agree with this mindset. My digital life is on the line because Google refuses to separate services.
8. namaria ◴[] No.35048039{4}[source]
Separating concerns, isolating things that are not related, these are some basic tenets of good engineering. Yet we all keep rolling the ball of mud downhill and act shocked it keeps growing and swallowing everything.
replies(1): >>35057985 #
9. amluto ◴[] No.35048365[source]
Egress pricing, for one.

fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that.

At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo.

For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps costs about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead.

You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.

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10. latchkey ◴[] No.35051330{5}[source]
Never once heard of that.
replies(1): >>35052064 #
11. latchkey ◴[] No.35051333[source]
There is a gcloud cli, but I just automated deployments in CI...

https://github.com/google-github-actions/deploy-cloud-functi...

12. miyuru ◴[] No.35052064{6}[source]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643
replies(1): >>35057956 #
13. re-thc ◴[] No.35054598{3}[source]
It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.
replies(1): >>35055941 #
14. amluto ◴[] No.35055941{4}[source]
The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud.

This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on.

(To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)

15. latchkey ◴[] No.35057956{7}[source]
Did you read the comments? My takeaway is that it was bs.
replies(1): >>35060172 #
16. latchkey ◴[] No.35057985{5}[source]
That's the beauty of the services I named. Super easy to roll the code to any other similar PaaS provider. There is no vendor lockin.

It is postgres + http handlers.

17. latchkey ◴[] No.35058011{3}[source]
Depending on what I'm building, I tend to cache on the edge with something like CloudFlare in front of GCP. Lowers the egress charges significantly, with the benefit of speeding everything up too.
18. 0cf8612b2e1e ◴[] No.35060172{8}[source]
There was one person strongly challenging the story and plenty of back and forth. It hardly seems a settled case one way or the other.