Show HN: Launch Heroku web dynos on faster infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Launch Heroku web dynos on faster infrastructure

fly.io

24 pointsmrkurt7 comments

Hello HN! This is the most fun thing I've worked on in a long time. We basically figured out how to pull down Heroku slugs, turn them into Docker Images, and then deploy them as Firecracker MicroVMs on our servers. All to make a "turboku" button.

What's crazy is how much faster is makes things. This is more a testament to Heroku being slow and 10 years stagnant than us being all that special, but it's still pretty neat to see stuff you think might work well actually pay off.

Incidentally, you can deploy containers directly to this same platform pretty quickly: https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/

Just want to say I’ve been following you guys since you launched and I think you’ve got a great product! It’s a bummer that the big CDN players have caught up to your original features, but you’re still alive with what looks to be an awesome iteration. IIRC you’re co-locating your servers and have a fast network too. (Do you peer at exchanges?)

I haven’t seen fly.io in a while but it looks like you’ve reframed it to app hosting (in addition to delivery)? I like that move, and this is a really cool hack you’ve got here. It’s a nice onboard ramp for Heroku expats who otherwise have no reason to leave. The “one click” is crucial and reminds me of Cloudflare’s initial foothold (“just change your DNS”).

Do you have any plans to replicate this for other PaaS providers?

Wow thanks! It's pretty cool you noticed some of this stuff. :D

It's partially that the big CDNs caught up, and partially that we have the luxury of not having to worry about a big legacy CDN. This iteration in particular has felt really right, but would have been infinitely hard to pull off if we were Fastly/Cloudflare.

We are focusing a ton on how to make app servers fast, basically bringing some infrastructure tooling to "boring" server apps (which are my favorite).

We definitely have plans for other PaaS providers. If you have requests I'd love to talk to you about it: kurt@fly.io

Cool! Nice work on this!

One click and now I have global dynos deployed all over the world!

What will it do with my environment variables? I've just tried with an Heroku app and I get nothing, Firefox cannot find the myherokuappname.fly.dev address.

It syncs heroku config variables into our secrets mechanism: https://fly.io/docs/secrets/

We’re troubleshooting your app right now! I’ll send you an email shortly.

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