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Comment by heeton | Hacker News Reader

I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them.

2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-herok...

I didn't want a self-hosted flavor of Heroku, and I value an opinionated and active community around the platform. I'll mirror another comment here:

> Everyone wants to be the new Heroku, but that should be table stakes. Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched.

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I can second fly.io, I moved a bunch of personal (but "production") projects from Heroku to it recently (Node, Rust, Rails) and the experience has been great. I can also second their Heroku migrator, worked pretty flawlessly.

Overall, my pricing has been about the same or 5-10% less per month.

It doesn't have the same "Click this button to add this third-party service to your dynos, with billing included" eco-system that Heroku has (had?) but my Heroku usage was pretty vanilla so it wasn't an issue for me.

That's the one thing I haven't seen anywhere else. I think technically, for "run simple automatically built containers with little dev effort." there are many better solutions than heroku. The marketplace is the only existing differentiator for heroku, and I don't really understand why no-one seems to be trying to recreate it.

I get "marketplaces" are hard and there's a chicken/egg problem, but is anyone working on it? I think fly has the rest of it sorted and is clearly better. Would love to see the additional services as well.

> I get "marketplaces" are hard and there's a chicken/egg problem, but is anyone working on it? I think fly has the rest of it sorted and is clearly better. Would love to see the additional services as well.

I don't think that particular type of marketplace suffers from the chicken/egg problem, as that problem for me indicates when you must acquire two marketplace participants but it's hard to acquire one without the other.

But when it comes to integrations like this, you could easily write your own integrations as long as the platforms you try to integrate have APIs. Or contract freelancers to build those two. You don't need to have the platform owner to write the integration itself.

I guess I'd call it a "soft chicken/egg" problem rather than "hard".

Railway sort of offers this: https://railway.app/button.

I've seen it around a couple of times, but ofc it's not hit the same momentum that Heroku had back in the day.

Another +1 for fly.io from me. I moved a 10 req/s API from Google Cloud Run to fly.io a couple weeks ago. It was a fast and easy transition. I'm now deployed at several edges reducing latency for far-away users, and it's cheaper than Google to boot.

Related to the thread, How practical is it to setup the distributed routing stuff of fly yourself?

Seems you have to buy an anycast-ip from somewhere or become your own ISP/network provider, configure a bunch of bgp routers & routes but that seems impractical for most. Stuff like Akamai, Cloudflare, Route53 have anycast-dns but that seem specifically for dns queries, not responding to a query and routing it somewhere.

Is it a problem that's just too big and difficult that you can't really self-host/spit-and-duct-tape your own system?

You'll need to acquire a /24 (that'll cost somewhere around $15,000), and then sign a deal with an upstream network provider who will accept BGP announcements. The actual networking part of it isn't that hard. To make the /24 worth it, you'll want a bunch of different regions, so you'll be paying for hosting in each.

Check out https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1abmV_mXWWCsVxHLfouSi...

> Fly is innovative

Most definitely. For most parts, it is hashicorp-as-a-service but without hashicorp!

There's a bunch of Hashi in there.

I also moved my postgres/django backend to fly.io using their automated tool which worked flawlessly, and my frontend (sveltekit) went to vercel.

Both services have been flawless so far at a much better cost/value proposition.

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched

I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative.

(Genuine question, not being cynical).

The big one as a layman is they've invested in tooling for "edge" compute - similar to CloudFlare distributing your static assets worldwide for faster responses, Fly gives you the tools to do the same for your app servers.

If you've got a worldwide audience you can set up your app in Dallas, Paris, Chennai, and Tokyo, have it auto-scale (and re-balance) instances based on which regions are the most in demand (eg, minimum 2 app servers per region, max 20 app servers, and it'll auto drift them throughout the day as needed). It also puts all your servers on a common VPN for communication, and they've got some tooling in place to help manage things like db replicas, replaying write requests back to the primary db env, etc.

It's not necessarily trivial to port any old app over (if you're doing writes every request for logging etc, that's something you'd want to change up backgrounding the writes) but it really can make a huge impact in responsiveness once you're set up.

That all sounds pretty cool. Nice to see people trying something new.

I think their auto-scaling is somewhat broken currently. I set up auto-scaling with min=2 and max=6, and my VMs aren't scaling down from 3 to 2 even though there are 0 active connections on all the VMs.

See the recent flurry of their sqlite replication blog posts:

- https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/

- https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/

This allows for extremely cheap s3 database backups as well as fast local serving layer.

And many more deep dives on their blog - https://fly.io/blog/

I'm on Gigalixir for my Elixir apps, and would switch to Fly.io if they had a "one-button" migration like they have with Heroku.

Price ?

Relatively cheap with some free tier? https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ One good thing is there is no DB-specific premium. It seems their PG is just an "app" on the platform and storage is priced accordingly.

I get an email each month forgiving my bill because it’s under $5. Got three small VMs running.

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