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1226 points bishopsmother | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.431s | source
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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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ec109685 ◴[] No.35046953[source]
The CloudFlare folks wrote a good blog post on how they are seeing their customers use Edge compute — latency is far down on the list: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-serverless-we...
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1. everybodyknows ◴[] No.35047067[source]
Hmm, that post is almost three years old -- still accurate?
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2. prdonahue ◴[] No.35048817[source]
Yes, especially as compliance and regulatory frameworks continue to evolve and become more difficult to adhere to as mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

We're inherently faster than other "serverless" platforms due to the scale and homogeneous design of our network, and that network has presence in nearly 50% more cities than it did just 3 years ago. We were plenty fast enough then and we're even faster now.

Other things that customers (still) really care about: developer experience, ease of use, and cost. Nobody likes paying the AWS tax to move data around—they just want to use the best solution from the best cloud provider. Workers and the associated storage primitives allow them to pick and choose from the best that AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, GCP, et al. have to offer.

(Disclaimer: I'm a long time Cloudflare employee focused on App Sec, and I speak to customers regularly who look to Workers largely for compliance reasons, but I don't work on the Developer Platform business. Am sure my Dev Platform peers will chime in with more nuanced answers!)