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.

Where does the misalignment between what the customer thinks they want, and what they actually want fit in to your philosophy? Google Spanner is a great example of this because who doesn't want instantaneous global writes? It's just that, y'know, there's a ton of businesses, especially smaller ones, that don't actually need that. The smarter customers realize this themselves, and can judge the premium they'd pay for Spanner over something far less complex. What I'm getting to is that sales is a critical company function to bridge the gap between what customers want, and what customers actually need, and for you to make money.

The first releases of EBS weren't very good and took a while to get to where we are. Some places still avoid using EBS due to bad experience back in 2011 when it was first released.

> who doesn't want instantaneous global writes

I want to gently note since I see a lot of misunderstanding around Spanner and global writes: Global writes need at least one round trip to each data center, and so they're still subject to the speed of light.

Like most things, it's more complex than that, and as a result it can be either faster or slower than 'median(RTT to each DC in quorum)'.

It's a delicate balance based on the locations that rows are being read and written. In the case where a row being repeatedly written from only one location and not being read from different location, the writes can be significantly faster than would be naively expected.