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 agree - fly is so easy to use (when it works) that it’s hard not to be impressed. BUT what I’ve found is that we don’t need edge compute, since our customers aren’t that latency sensitive, so it’s lost on us. It’s only a few more milliseconds to us-east-1.

I’ve heard (on HN) of a dozen different companies vying for the heroku replacement spots and yet Fly seemed to capture the attention. I couldn’t name another one off hand.

What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl (and workflow) for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

> What I truly want and probably lots of other people too is Flyctl for AWS. The same simplicity to run as fly, but give me something cheap in Virginia or the Dalles.

Google Cloud. It is painfully easy to spin up managed postgres, super easy to deploy gcp cloud functions or gcp cloud run. It isn't expensive either and just works.

If someone is not already using the holy trinity (AWS/Azure/GCP) there is probably a reason.

Egress pricing, for one.

fly.io charges an outrageous 2 cents/GB. Google is over 4x that.

At fly.io rates, 1Gbps average over a month is $6400/mo. Google is tiered and you’re looking at over $10k/mo.

For comparison, a cheap managed switch that can handle 1Gbps costs about $100, maybe a bit more if you want a nice one. A nice router is more. You can rent an entire rack, including power, cooling, and an unmetered 1Gbps for $300-$1k/mo (with maybe some wiggle room on both ends). You can buy a pretty nice server, amortize the price over a week or two, and still come out ahead.

You certainly get considerable value from a major cloud provider, and a lot of their other services are reasonably priced, but, depending on your workload, the egress prices and the corresponding Hotel California factor may make using a major cloud provider a poor proposition.

It's potentially a lot more for the big clouds. Anything in the network path has a charge - load balancers, NAT gateways, etc.