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Reliability: It’s not great

(community.fly.io)
1226 points bishopsmother | 1 comments | 06 Mar 23 17:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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mrkurt ◴[06 Mar 23 21:56 UTC] No.35048244[source]▶
This is, indeed, the exciting part. As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement. And if it did, it seemed like Render was the natural Heroku v.next.

One thing we've noticed, though, is that people do actually want Heroku but close to users. It's not exactly edge compute. In some cases, it's "Heroku in Tokyo". In others it's "Heroku, but running in all the english speaking regions".

I think the thing that ate up most of our energy is also the thing that might actually make this business work. We built on top of our own hardware. That's the thing that made it difficult to build managed Postgres. We put way more energy into the underlying infrastructure than most nü-Heroku companies. The cost was extreme, but I'm like 63% sure this was the right choice.

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1. jrochkind1 ◴[06 Mar 23 22:38 UTC] No.35048784[source]▶
> As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement.

If Salesforce kept investing in heroku, it might not. But there is a huge loss of confidence in heroku's future going on among heroku's customers right now, which is part of what you're seeing, as I'm sure you know. (Also I think to some extent you are being political/kind towards heroku... if heroku's owners were still investing in heroku for real, adding 'edge' functionality like fly.io is focusing on is what one would probably expect...)

And frankly... your tool seems more mature and... not to be rude to competitors but seems to have more of that certain `je ne sais quoi` of Developer Experience Happiness that heroku _used_ to have and other potential heroku competitors don't really quite seem to have yet. Does what you expect/need in a polished and consistent way.

I think work you put into the underlying infrastructure definitely shows there, and was the right choice. Tidy infrastructure helps with tidy consistent developer experience.

So I understand why people are looking to you as a heroku replacement. I am too! (And I don't really need the edge compute stuff; although I could potentially see using it in the future, and it shows you folks are on top of things).

And while I kept reading fly staff saying on HN comments that you didn't want to be a heroku replacement, so were unconcerned with the few places people were mentioning where you still felt short of it -- when I saw your investment in Rails documentation and tools (and contribs back to Rails), I thought, aha, i think they've realized this is a market looking for them, which they are only a couple steps from and it would make sense to meet.

When you mention in OP a "heroku exodus" to you... I'm curious if that was all people who left when heroku ended free tier stuff, and they've all come to you for your free tier stuff... becuase that does seem dangerous, such a giant spike in users who are not paying and don't bring revenue with them! I don't personally use very much heroku free tier stuff. I hope if that's a challenge, it's one you can get over. I don't think you are under any obligation to offer free stuff that can be used for real production workloads indefinitely -- although, as I'm sure you know, free stuff is huge for allowing people to try _before_ they buy, and whatever limits you put on it to try to prevent indefinite production use get in the way of someone's "try before you buy" too... and at this point, _reducing_ your free offerings is a lot harder PR-wise than having started out with less in the first place. :(