←back to thread

Reliability: It’s not great

(community.fly.io)
1226 points bishopsmother | 4 comments | 06 Mar 23 17:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.857s | source
Show context
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!

replies(20): >>35046650 #>>35046685 #>>35046754 #>>35046953 #>>35047128 #>>35047302 #>>35047334 #>>35047345 #>>35047376 #>>35047603 #>>35047656 #>>35047786 #>>35047788 #>>35047937 #>>35048244 #>>35048674 #>>35049946 #>>35050285 #>>35051885 #>>35056048 #
satvikpendem ◴[06 Mar 23 21:07 UTC] No.35047603[source]▶
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

replies(2): >>35048654 #>>35048955 #
notpushkin ◴[06 Mar 23 22:27 UTC] No.35048654[source]▶
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.

replies(5): >>35048720 #>>35049033 #>>35049034 #>>35050171 #>>35050962 #
doodlesdev ◴[06 Mar 23 23:00 UTC] No.35049034[source]▶
How do Coolify and Dokku compare? I've been aware of Dokku for a long time already, however I've never been confident enough to rely on these interfaces to deploy applications, specially because of their business model to keep things going. I'll have to try them both eventually though, I absolutely hate PaaS honestly, the prices are all just too high, but the convenience is really nice when managing a multitude of services simultaneously.
replies(2): >>35049604 #>>35049774 #
1. notpushkin ◴[06 Mar 23 23:54 UTC] No.35049604[source]▶
I think overall Coolify is a bit more modern. It uses some different components (e. g. Traefik vs Nginx for reverse proxying), and includes a UI in its basic package (Dokku was CLI only for a long time, now they have Dokku Pro with a Web UI). Otherwise it looks like the architecture is pretty much the same.

Re: business model: both Coolify and Dokku are open source, so even if their development stops, you can continue to use them no matter what. (You do have to pay for your own servers though :-) So it's not a PaaS in the traditional sense (like Fly.io or Heroku), but more like “build your own PaaS” thing.

replies(1): >>35049803 #
2. josegonzalez ◴[07 Mar 23 00:15 UTC] No.35049803[source]▶
Dokku maintainer here

For proxying requests, Dokku currently supports:

    - nginx on the host (default)
    - traefik (via docker labels)
    - caddy (via docker labels)
    - haproxy (via docker labels)
We'll also soon support nginx via docker labels, which will work around issues where Docker sometimes assigns random IP addresses (and unlock TCP/UDP proxying as well).

I can't say anything else about Coolify since I haven't used it in a while, but I'd be curious as to what other parts are more modern about Coolify than Dokku.

replies(1): >>35049891 #
3. notpushkin ◴[07 Mar 23 00:28 UTC] No.35049891[source]▶
Wow, looks like Dokku got a lot of upgrades since last time I used it thoroughly. I'm wondering though, why support four different proxies?

About the modern part: that was my opinion based on the way I recall Dokku and Coolify, and a quick scroll through the docs of both, so I might be really wrong here! I definitely need to check out both Dokku and Coolify again sometime.

replies(1): >>35049951 #
4. josegonzalez ◴[07 Mar 23 00:36 UTC] No.35049951{3}[source]▶
We support 4 different ones to give folks choice. Some folks want/need features that aren't available on one vs the other (traefik has a ton of features, caddy is simple to configure, nginx has a ton of documentation) so it made sense from that perspective. It was also easy to add once I had the pattern going (though the default has stayed nginx).

One of the main features of Dokku is it's extensibility. You can cut one part out and replace it with another quite easily, and proxying is an example of that. I think that flexibility allows folks to use it in more situations than one otherwise would, though at the cost of being more difficult to maintain (and harder to have cohesion between parts of the system at times).