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Reliability: It’s not great

(community.fly.io)
1226 points bishopsmother | 8 comments | 06 Mar 23 17:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.751s | 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!

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vineyardmike ◴[06 Mar 23 19:50 UTC] No.35046650[source]▶
I agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1.

I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one off hand.

What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl (and workflow) for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

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cldellow ◴[06 Mar 23 19:56 UTC] No.35046724[source]▶
Render.com is another spiritual successor of Heroku. I'd love a world where Fly and Render are both very successful companies.
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te_chris ◴[06 Mar 23 20:10 UTC] No.35046896[source]▶
Not gonna happen. Both will get acquired because that’s how things work now
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1. anurag ◴[06 Mar 23 21:33 UTC] No.35047954[source]▶
(Render founder) I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome. Render has positive gross margin and a clear path to profitability based on both our growth so far and the tailwinds in this space. I'm also aware of other companies like ours that have grown all the way to IPO or are well on their way.

I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.

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2. te_chris ◴[06 Mar 23 22:32 UTC] No.35048710[source]▶
I guess I’m just default cynical these days seeing how much money’s still floating around and the scale of the cloud big 3. Apologies, it wasn’t personal. I admire your vision and hope it can work, money always seems to talk eventually though. We need more companies that have the nerve to hold on and develop on their own.
3. metadat ◴[06 Mar 23 23:52 UTC] No.35049580[source]▶
I admire your sentiment, at the same time founding teams don't typically say no to US$XX,XXX,XXX,XXX acquisition offers that'd cash you out for at least a few billion to you personally.

Are there any examples where the capitalism bottom line is ignored and a company keeps growing with extremely premium generous acquisition offers on the table? I can't think of any, but there could be a few. However, I expect it's pretty rare.

For companies with such tremendous growth, the venture capitalist firms are primarily looking to make their <big-multiplier> return and push priorities accordingly (understandably).

The only constant in life is change, it's best to focus on what you can do right now, today, and only put out promises or commitments that you have the necessary influence to follow through on. Some things are bigger than each of us.

Best wishes and godspeed to you and fly.io!

4. Aeolun ◴[07 Mar 23 00:56 UTC] No.35050076[source]▶
> I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome.

I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money.

Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective.

It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m still very skeptical of them not being bought out in 10 years.

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5. onethought ◴[07 Mar 23 06:10 UTC] No.35052153[source]▶
Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter (kinda), Valve all have not been acquired and have existed for a long timescale...
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6. antupis ◴[07 Mar 23 08:30 UTC] No.35053004[source]▶
Times are now different money is not free anymore so those big acquisitions need to make real business sense.
7. fauigerzigerk ◴[07 Mar 23 09:06 UTC] No.35053247{3}[source]▶
That's clearly survivorship bias.

What you want to know is the probability of a small, independent, high quality provider remaining independent, high quality and not bankrupt.

It does seem to be rare in the tech space, especially in the US. Becoming one of the largest public corporations on earth is one way to do it, as you suggested, but the odds of that happening are miniscule.

8. Aeolun ◴[07 Mar 23 09:15 UTC] No.35053298{3}[source]▶
For obvious reasons I’m excluding the companies doing the acquiring.

Except Valve I guess, but that was never a public company that could be acquired to satisfy investors in the first place.