What exactly does Fly.io give you?
You already know how to set up your project locally. Why not just do the same setup on any cloud VM and boom it is online?
You already know how to set up your project locally. Why not just do the same setup on any cloud VM and boom it is online?
That's more than what I would have or need locally.
In my experience, for a simple PHP web application, the smallest VMs already can handle a thousand concurrent users, which amounts to something like a million monthly users.
But if your users are distributed around the world and most requests are read requests then it can make sense to shave 100 or 200 ms off your response times.
You can always squander those gains later by running JavaScript for 5000 ms before showing anything :)
Having used various PaaS services that take this "pain" away from you, I sort of think the tradeoff isn't worth it. For $5/m DO will give you a backed up server. Add $15 for postgres that is a good deal.
I used Heroku for a project mostly because my team didn't have skill set to set this up and I wasn't going to do it. As far as I know they are still on Heroku (with a smattering of AWS services) for that same reason: just works and cheaper than doing it yourself.
Who doesn't? I couldn't imagine having to push to some cloud agent and wait a random amount of time every time I want to test something. With it local I can just save, maybe rebuild or have it auto-rebuild if necessary, and test, then repeat. On a fast machine this can be a few seconds or instantaneous.
Maybe the niche I'm missing here is very "green" developers who don't know how to do any sysadmin work or deploy things.
If this is you, learn it. It pays off huge, not just during development but in being able to have a lot more choice about where you deploy and a lot more control over your own stuff.
I’ve run Kubernetes clusters in multiple Parallels VMs locally with work loads in them to play around.
You also learn a ton about how things work which helps you debug and fix stuff when things go wrong. Even if you use managed stuff it’s always a huge plus to understand at least the basics of how it runs.