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1226 points bishopsmother | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.748s | source
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samwillis ◴[] 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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leishman ◴[] No.35047376[source]
This is spot on. I found myself using Fly for a project because it was super easy, not because I needed edge compute. TBH it's still actually unclear to me who needs edge compute? What apps require this sort of infra? It's not 99% of web apps right?
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1. quickthrower2 ◴[] No.35050011[source]
It is going to be apps that provide rich experiences that need to do a lot of server communication to deliver them. I am thinking of things like collaborative whiteboards, for example. If 2 people are in Europe, working on the same whiteboard, then it should be low latency. The edge nodes will be near each other (or next to each other).