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    Reliability: It’s not great

    (community.fly.io)
    1226 points bishopsmother | 21 comments | 06 Mar 23 17:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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    samwillis ◴[06 Mar 23 19:38 UTC] 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 #
    bostik ◴[06 Mar 23 20:42 UTC] No.35047302[source]▶
    There's a wonderfully blunt saying that applies here (too): you are not in the business you think you are, you are in the business your customers think you are.

    If you offer data volumes, the low water mark is how EBS behaves. If you offer a really simple way to spin up Postgres databases, you are implicitly promising a fully managed experience.

    And $deity forbid, if you want global CRUD with read-your-own-writes semantics, the yardstick people measure you against is Google's Spanner.

    replies(3): >>35047659 #>>35047660 #>>35050121 #
    1. quickthrower2 ◴[06 Mar 23 21:11 UTC] No.35047659[source]▶
    In a nutshell if you offer cloud services you need to be better than the MAG clan, Digital Ocean too. And people will want it dirt cheap. It’s still hard to be a profitable web host as it always was (MAG has the advantage that none of them were web hosts at first base)
    replies(3): >>35047745 #>>35049819 #>>35049926 #
    2. blowski ◴[06 Mar 23 21:18 UTC] No.35047745[source]▶
    MAG?
    replies(5): >>35047936 #>>35047953 #>>35047955 #>>35047965 #>>35047966 #
    3. jerrygenser ◴[06 Mar 23 21:32 UTC] No.35047936[source]▶
    microsoft apple google
    4. gizmo ◴[06 Mar 23 21:33 UTC] No.35047953[source]▶
    Microsoft (azure) Amazon (aws) Google (gcloud)
    replies(1): >>35051262 #
    5. adw ◴[06 Mar 23 21:33 UTC] No.35047955[source]▶
    I’m assuming Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, but it’s new to me too
    6. avidal ◴[06 Mar 23 21:34 UTC] No.35047965[source]▶
    From context, I'm assuming Microsoft / Amazon / Google, referring to Azure / AWS / Google Cloud respectively.
    replies(1): >>35055257 #
    7. ◴[06 Mar 23 21:34 UTC] No.35047966[source]▶
    8. slt2021 ◴[07 Mar 23 00:17 UTC] No.35049819[source]▶
    if you add Akamai (Linode ) or Alibaba Cloud - then it will be come MAAG
    replies(2): >>35050026 #>>35051216 #
    9. chillfox ◴[07 Mar 23 00:33 UTC] No.35049926[source]▶
    I am willing to pay a little extra for a nice dev/ops experience and simple/easy solutions that doesn't require spending days reading docs and diving into dashboards with thousands of options.

    Usually this results in me jumping on new platforms and then abandoning them once they add too much complexity.

    replies(1): >>35049976 #
    10. quickthrower2 ◴[07 Mar 23 00:40 UTC] No.35049976[source]▶
    I suspect, in general, acceptability (or desire) for complexity in the cloud solution, and budget are positively correlated in customers.
    replies(2): >>35050503 #>>35051803 #
    11. Aeolun ◴[07 Mar 23 00:47 UTC] No.35050026[source]▶
    MAGA?
    replies(3): >>35050234 #>>35052295 #>>35052948 #
    12. mr90210 ◴[07 Mar 23 01:16 UTC] No.35050234{3}[source]▶
    Geez chill.
    13. kkielhofner ◴[07 Mar 23 01:52 UTC] No.35050503{3}[source]▶
    The ridiculously overwhelming complexity is stickiness.

    Think it’s bad to potentially technically move your solution from $CLOUD vendor? Wait until you turn around and realize you have at least one full time hire who’s entire role is “$BIGCLOUD Certified Architect” (or whatever) and your entire dev staff was also at least partially selected for experience with the preferred cloud vendor. At any kind of scale you have massive amounts of tooling, technical debt, and institutional knowledge built around the cloud provider of choice.

    Then there’s all of the legal, actually understanding billing (pretty much impossible but you’re probably close by now), etc elsewhere in the org. At this point you’ve probably utilized an outside service/consultant or two from the entire cottage industry that has sprung up to plug holes in/augment your cloud provider of choice.

    After realizing their cloud spend has ballooned well beyond what they ever anticipated plenty of orgs get far enough to investigate leaving before they realize all of this. Most decide to suck it up and keep paying, or try to somehow negotiate or optimize spend down further.

    Cloud platforms are a true masterclass in customer stickiness and retention - to the Oracle and Microsoft level (who also operate clouds).

    It’s interesting here on HN because while MS and Oracle are bashed for these practices AWS and GCP (for the most part) are pretty beloved for what are really the same practices.

    replies(1): >>35055626 #
    14. selcuka ◴[07 Mar 23 03:33 UTC] No.35051216[source]▶
    Linode is not the same scale as the top 3. I believe even Digital Ocean is bigger than them (for now).
    15. cortesoft ◴[07 Mar 23 03:41 UTC] No.35051262{3}[source]▶
    They should have gone with GAA
    16. chillfox ◴[07 Mar 23 05:07 UTC] No.35051803{3}[source]▶
    Sadly I think you are likely correct.
    17. chupasaurus ◴[07 Mar 23 06:37 UTC] No.35052295{3}[source]▶
    That's for top 4 companies by market cap.
    replies(1): >>35053354 #
    18. ocimbote ◴[07 Mar 23 08:22 UTC] No.35052948{3}[source]▶
    oh no, not again.
    19. robertlagrant ◴[07 Mar 23 09:25 UTC] No.35053354{4}[source]▶
    MAGA cap?
    20. gvtek0 ◴[07 Mar 23 13:48 UTC] No.35055257{3}[source]▶
    Yep.

    Because when I think reliable cloud infra, I think Azure.

    21. nostrebored ◴[07 Mar 23 14:21 UTC] No.35055626{4}[source]▶
    This is really an oversimplification. MS and Oracle have licensing that's explicit in the way that it wants to lock you in, although in different ways. AWS and GCP posting public pricing that can apply all the way until you reach an absurd spend goes a long way, and the ability to turn off a workload tomorrow incentivizes these platforms to provide a high quality of service.

    When working at AWS, a large part of the convincing for an MS shop would be around showing that we can offer a lower price than the 'discounting' that MS provides. Oracle was all about contract expiry.

    While there's some complexity around migrating a workload, regardless of where it's at, many places are going into cloud migrations hoping to remain relatively platform agnostic. I've seen many successful migrations to and from different vendors, and often at an SMB or ME scale, in weeks not years.