Reliability: It’s not great

I get that growing is super hard. And maybe fly will grow up to be a good platform some day. But that's the future. Today, they're flying by the seat of their pants and I mostly feel sorry for people who were tricked into thinking this platform is ready for production use.

Your post implies corporate messaging is bad. And anything posted by a company—or at least I don't know where you draw the line—can be considered corporate messaging. Am I just reading too much into your phrasing?

If you don't have SLOs and SLAs, then you get what you get, essentially. Even a company with a great reputation can completely reverse course with a single bad incident, and you get nothing in return if there's not a contract.

They are being open and transparent (afaik) even if carefully worded, which I also don’t blame them for.

Companies that engage in this kind of candor are careful not to disclose those things that would really hurt their business. Those things are still kept secret. If the CEO accidentally sexually harassed an employee that's not getting disclosed. A mea culpa is only offered for the issues that are already known regarding scaling, downtime, and missing features. Struggles they have because they're choosing to grow so fast.

They can trot out a low level person to stall you with questions, or an AI question generator that maximizes the amount of time you waste on your end, and call that "SLA met".

And even if they DON'T meet the SLA on occasion, you built your stack on AWS. You are laying in the bed you made.

SO, what, AWS throws some free credits (that their 30-40% margin easily absorbs)?

The only big stick in these types of things is having dual-cloud capability, where you can move your service quickly from one cloud to the other. Stateless API servers? Maybe. Database servers? ouch. Cassandra could reliably span two clouds, man would AWS kill you on their ludicrously overpriced network costs.

Has anyone does Postgres replication across providers as a useful production system? Doubt it.

I guess, you and GP are in agreement for the strategic part of the argument at least, if not the genuine part of it.

As someone who's been active on Fly's community forums for close to 18 months now, I think Fly employs some of the most genuine and helpful engs you'll see, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, both are examples of "self-serving corporate communication" - but it's clear that the way Fly communicate here is more valuable and trustworthy than so many other examples of this kind of thing handled poorly.

If I had a bad day and didn't get to complete something within my estimate, I'll tell my boss I had a bad day and ask for more time. Does that mean I have ulterior some ulterior motives? No, I just had a shit day, and needed some compassion.

They have been going through a rough patch recently with their scalability problems. And they realised they might not address it as easily or as quickly as they'd like. So they just wanted to buy time. I think that's better than "bunkering" and not letting your customers know what's up.

They do have the benefit that their audience is tech savvy as they are, so they can go into more details (and be less formal, I suppose) to get some understanding from their customers. As in, most devs have struggled at some point with a problem that exceeded the initial scope/time estimate. It sucks, and we know it sucks. So, why not give them the benefit of the doubt here?

Like, I think understand what you mean: their goal was to buy more time, and they achieved that. But even though it was corporate messaging, I still think it was genuine. I assume they felt a bit like "ok shit, we gotta talk to our customers, they deserve to know what's going on".

I guess they wouldn't air most their internal issue, since those don't aren't felt by the customers. So there's no need to apologise and explain themselves.