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!

I'm going to plug Coolify, an open source Heroku alternative (with Docker support too) that I'm using on a cheap $5 Hetzner server which is a lot cheaper than the equivalent Fly or Render etc service, and it really doesn't have much upkeep from me even if you add in the time setting up the server initially, which is like an hour, and afterwards, it Just Works™.

https://coolify.io

Dokku is also nice and battle-tested: https://dokku.com/

And may I also plug Lunni, a self-hosted Docker Swarm-based PaaS I'm working on right now: https://lunni.dev/

Both work pretty well on $5 servers.

Lunni looks really interesting! Looks like a Coolify competitor, I'll definitely check it out. Do you have a Discord to join? Coolify has one and I found it great to discuss the project and talk directly to the creator.

I used to use Dokku but I personally liked the GUI from Coolify so I've been using that. Nice to see that you have a GUI as well, makes configuring apps a lot easier.

That's a nice idea actually, thank you! Just launched one:

https://discord.gg/9EAne8g2Pq

(Bridged to Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#lunni:matrix.org)

Lunni is actually pretty young in terms of community (just me and a few friends now :-), so just a room in Telegram was sufficient so far, but I think it's a good time to start something more official.

Thanks, just joined. One thing I noticed is that the CI/CD setup for GitHub/lab is still based on the CI files themselves. What I like about Coolify and didn't like about others is that I could simply install a GitHub app to my account and Coolify would automatically pull my repositories and even set up git push to deploy for me, no messing around with CI files needed.

https://lunni.dev/docs/deploy/from-git/#github vs https://docs.coollabs.io/coolify/sources

I haven't thought of an app yet, but a custom GitHub Action was definitely on my radar. IIRC this would still be a one-click setup, but more integrated with the Actions UI, and will be easier to extend / override later, if needed. What do you think?