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1226 points bishopsmother | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | 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. decidertm ◴[] No.35047937[source]
I'm a co-founder at Northflank. This is what we've spent 3+ years building. https://northflank.com.

I am sympathetic with much of Kurt's post. We spent a long time building solutions to several of the areas highlighted (managed PG, persistent volumes, secret management and service discovery).

Making radical changes to architecture on a live cloud platform is always a challenge.

On the front-end Northflank is a next-gen PaaS built for high DX, speed, and powerful capability (real-time UI, API, CLI, GitOps, IaC).

Our backend is built using Kubernetes as an OS: providing a huge amount of flexibility on service discovery, load-balancing, persistence/volumes and scale.

The benefit of using Kubernetes is a universal API across all major cloud providers. We can scale clusters and regions across EKS, GKE and AKS in seconds, either in our managed PaaS or inside our customer's own cloud account.

Our managed dataservices: MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Mongo, Minio are all built using Kubernetes Operators with a small but mighty team.

From a generous free tier to autoscaling to managed postgres and other advanced PaaS/DevOps automation workflows Northflank offers something unique.