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 can second this. We were evaluating moving off Heroku and to Fly.io, but we didn't need all of the edge compute stuff. We just want a better Heroku without having to think about infrastructure and having to think about edge compute just got in our way.

I feel like Next.js is in a similar position. While their main vision is SSR, I wonder if they are missing out on a chunk of the market that simply doesn't want to think about infra. We use them because we just don't have to worry about webpack or fiddling with deployment and hosting. We could care less about SSR and in fact we disabled it app-wide.

One of the key design choices of Next.js was to enable granularity on the runtime (Node.js or Edge[1]) and the rendering method (static or dynamic[2]) on a per-route basis. If you want a full SSR site, that's okay. If you want a full static site, that's also okay.

We often see folks wanting a mix of both. For example, maybe the /about page is static, but the home page is dynamic and personalized based on the visitor. You can do all of this with Next.js. Our future direction is adding even further granularity, enabling this decision at the data fetch level, allowing you to cache results across deployments[3].

[1]: https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/rendering/edge-and-nodejs-runti...

[2]: https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/rendering/static-and-dynamic-re...

[3]: https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-cache-api-nextjs-cache