Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it

You know what's interesting? It feels like history is repeating itself with Fly.io, just like it did back when I first encountered Heroku. Back in the day, I was super excited about Fly.io – it had that same fresh, exciting vibe that Heroku had when it burst onto the scene.

I remember being blown away by Fly.io's simplicity and how easy it was to use. It was like hosting made simple, and I couldn't help but think, "This is it, this is the one!"

But, as time went on, I noticed little signs of trouble. Downtimes became more frequent, and my deployments, which were once snappy and seamless, turned into agonizingly slow affairs. It was like déjà vu from the time when Heroku's greatness started to wane.

It's disheartening to see Fly.io go down a similar path. As more people flocked to the platform, it seems like its performance began to suffer – just like what happened with Heroku. The more popular it got, the less reliable it seemed to become.

Scrolling through Hacker News, I can't help but feel a sense of disappointment. Others are expressing their frustration too, and it's like we're all reliving that moment when Heroku lost its charm and became a hassle.

I have to admit; it worries me. It's like a cautionary tale of how even the most promising platforms can fall from grace. It's the reality of the fast-paced tech world, but it's tough to accept.

So yeah, here I am, hoping against hope that Fly.io can somehow break free from this cycle and find its footing before it becomes as useless as Heroku was at its lowest point.

I feel the same way.

Do you think its related to scale? As in, once a company has enough paying customers to become profitable/investable, it has also accrued enough issues to where it starts feeling fresh and exciting like you said, and gradually becomes like the older competitor it once wanted to replace?

This is my experience at least. Once the company goes from a few pizzas to "we've booked a venue", entropy creeps in and adages like Conway's/Brook's law become increasingly evident.

The skillset of successfully founding a company and the skillset of successfully scaling a company are not the same. The latter is a hard thing to do that requires understanding both customers (current and potential) that you never speak to and employees that you barely speak to.

It was a bit alarming to see Fly offering significant resources for free (and encourage using them in the docs, subtly making them a feature and a reason to switch) back then. I wondered if they overestimated the conscientiousness of the industry: as with Heroku, surely once the word is out in the wider world plenty of people would flock over just to not pay. Guess what happened next…

Heroku was a new thing back then, so it took a while for abuse to ramp up—but every subsequent attempt at being generous should not even be considered without either a vicious and expensive anti-fraud department in place or deep pockets to compensate for the initial lack of said department by throwing enough hardware that the minority of honest users don’t notice the overhead.

My impression suggests that Fly does not score high on either of the above. Which is partly why I like them—the above seems like megacorp type bullshit, and they seem to be strictly no-megacorp-bullshit—but I wouldn’t be surprised if engineers at Fly had to spent most of their time dealing with fires or optimizing resource allocation and auto-limiting freeloading cryptominers, scammers, and other abusers rather than focusing on longer term infrastructure reliability or DX.