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1226 points bishopsmother | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.413s | 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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1. richardhod ◴[] No.35047334[source]
What are the limitations to heroku that people are going to Fly for? Maybe there's a standard article that would be useful to read about it?
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2. zamnos ◴[] No.35047863[source]
It's more about Heroku dropping free and low-cost plans, which is them demonstrating that they don't currently care about three low end of the market, more than any specfic feature.
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3. doodlesdev ◴[] No.35049168[source]
Also the absolute disaster with security they had just before dropping free tiers, and the awful response which took months to even acknowledge some kinds of data (such as pipeline keys) where affected. [0]

[0]: https://github.blog/2022-04-15-security-alert-stolen-oauth-u...

4. mcintyre1994 ◴[] No.35049254[source]
This is an old doc from fly so I’m not sure how much of it is still accurate, but it talks about some of the stuff Heroku didn’t have that they have: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app/

> There's no support for a single dedicated IP address for your application. With Heroku, your application's CPU resources are mostly located in one datacenter. Heroku doesn't support HTTP2 or Brotli compression and it doesn't do Edge TLS termination. And it doesn't run your applications on dedicated MicroVMs. These are all things that Fly's Global Application Platform does.

The other comment that mentions Heroku dropping low cost plans is the reason for the explosion in growth as I understand it though.

5. simonw ◴[] No.35050775[source]
People don't trust it any more, because Salesforce have been under-investing in it for years and recently rug-pulled on everyone who had ever used the free tier (after providing that free tier for 15 years already - long enough for people to reasonably expect it to continue).