←back to thread

1226 points bishopsmother | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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!

replies(20): >>35046650 #>>35046685 #>>35046754 #>>35046953 #>>35047128 #>>35047302 #>>35047334 #>>35047345 #>>35047376 #>>35047603 #>>35047656 #>>35047786 #>>35047788 #>>35047937 #>>35048244 #>>35048674 #>>35049946 #>>35050285 #>>35051885 #>>35056048 #
leishman ◴[] No.35047376[source]
This is spot on. I found myself using Fly for a project because it was super easy, not because I needed edge compute. TBH it's still actually unclear to me who needs edge compute? What apps require this sort of infra? It's not 99% of web apps right?
replies(4): >>35047492 #>>35047738 #>>35048037 #>>35050011 #
1. davnicwil ◴[] No.35047492[source]
Personally I see this as a 'why not, if it works' type thing.

Sure you don't need it for 99% of usecases, but if it just works using familiar architectures then it is also strictly better for 99% of usecases so you might as well, and people will naturally want it.

That 'familiar architectures' part is the hard bit, though.

replies(1): >>35047615 #
2. kevincox ◴[] No.35047615[source]
But it isn't better in 99% of use cases. Lots of use cases are rendering an API response or HTML page that involves multiple database requests. Therefore the distance between database and app server is more important than the distance between the client and the app server.

Edge compute can be helpful for static or quite cachable content. But often this is handled as well or nearly as well by a caching CDN.

So that leaves a few cases where edge compute is useful. Where you are globally distributing the data itself (and ideally moving the data around as your users travel or move) which is incredibly rare and expensive to build, and when you need pure computation that needs no request to your backend and if 50ms of latency is important for a pure computation most of the time you can just move it to the client. In my experience these tend to be rare. I would estimate that edge compute is actually helpful for 1-5% of projects, not 99%.