Reliability: It’s not great

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!

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.

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)

MAG?