Choose a docker image and just docker-compose up your application.
If you outgrow that, you might aswell switch to kubernetes and aws/gcp/azure
But if you do no amount of Kubernetes on the old school cloud providers is going to get you there. You will encounter the hard problems fly solves for.
Unless data is geographically sharded as well, is there really a benefit? Collaborative apps perhaps?
I think the killer app on fly is actually a geo aware sql db such as cockroach. That as a managed offering puts fly above and beyond anything we’ve had before.
I suspect they know this.
Geo aware SQL DB sounds like a lot of added complexity. What is the latency trade off in practice? 100ms ping time is probably small compared to query execution time, especially if your backend returns everything the frontend needs in one response.
I understand someone at the scale of Amazon wanting to shave ms off page loads. But most web apps?
The last web app I worked on had a latency budget of 200ms. The one before that it was 400.
Cross pacific queries can take 200 of that off the top. Even transcontinental is close to 80. With query times you can at least work to improve them.
Now it’s not as simple as just locality but that’s a starting point.