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Reliability: It’s not great

(community.fly.io)
1226 points bishopsmother | 3 comments | 06 Mar 23 17:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sergiotapia ◴[06 Mar 23 19:25 UTC] No.35046297[source]▶
It's been almost a year since I gave Fly a review (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31391116) and it's a bummer that they're still struggling to get things right. Double bummer because I love Phoenix and Elixir and they employ Chris McCord there.

Maybe they were _too_ ambitious at the start? They have a hard road ahead of them, and competition like Render.com and Northflank have provided me with solutions to all of my problems. Great dev ux, great prices and predictable solutions. They also keep pushing out very useful features. A third competitor also sprung up Railway! There's certainly blood in the water.

Will they catch up to others before the competition solves the "global mesh" unique value proposition Fly.io currently has? That's the $1MM question.

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zomglings ◴[06 Mar 23 20:12 UTC] No.35046911[source]▶
I read your review, and had a question so I thought I'd follow up here. You mentioned render.com as a competitor - does render host its own infrastructure or do they act as a go-between between their users and AWS/GCP/whatever?
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cldellow ◴[06 Mar 23 20:42 UTC] No.35047296[source]▶
They act as a go-between in that they ultimately host on AWS/GCP. They host their own infrastructure in that they appear to run Kubernetes and have built out their own deployment and service fabric, so they're just using the underlying machines as dumb compute, they're not, eg, building on RDS.

In March 2021, someone asked a question about carbon emissions of their data centres. They said they hosted on both GCP and AWS, but mentioned they were interested in moving to their own bare metal [1].

In April 2021, I asked a question about egress fees to Google, and they walked back a bit the comment about moving to bare metal [2].

As of March 2022, they're still in AWS/GCP [3].

As of September 2022, workloads for new users deploy into AWS, even in regions that were previously served by GCP [4].

[1]: https://community.render.com/t/does-render-use-green-energy/...

[2]: https://community.render.com/t/is-render-com-hosted-in-googl...

[3]: https://community.render.com/t/are-your-servers-owned-by-you...

[4]: https://community.render.com/t/which-render-regions-map-to-w...

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1. anurag ◴[06 Mar 23 21:19 UTC] No.35047759{3}[source]▶
(Render founder) We're still on public clouds because even if it doesn't help with margins, it helps us move faster on features our customers want. It's all one big prioritization problem (and lots of little ones too!).
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2. zomglings ◴[06 Mar 23 22:55 UTC] No.35048972[source]▶
I'm curious how significant a risk products like AWS Lightsail are to your business - it seems you are competing in the same market, but:

1. They have vastly different ongoing capital and cashflow requirements than you do.

2. They have all the leverage when it comes to the question of your continued operations on their cloud.

I'm also curious if they have already offered to just buy you out since you're clearly succeeding where they seem to just be treading water. (But not expecting you to answer this question. :) )

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3. ignoramous ◴[06 Mar 23 23:23 UTC] No.35049300[source]▶
> how significant a risk products like AWS Lightsail are to your business - it seems you are competing in the same market

Not Anurag, but as ex-Stripe himself, he may appreciate AWS Flexible Payment Service vs. Stripe parallels here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34513430