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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand the value prop of fly.io. They seem to have an impressive engineering team despite the outages, but is edge compute really something that 99.9% of devs need? There are tons of large companies that operate out of a single AWS region and those services are used by millions around the globe. It just strikes me as something that enables premature optimization right out of the box.

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It's basically the new Heroku with less lock-in, because it works with Docker.

You get edge computing, autoscaling, and load balancing without additional configuration.

Not as flexible as AWS, but also much easier to setup and maintain.

But the reliability issues suck now and then.

This is precisely it. The ease of deploy, https domain configuration, scaling.

Additionally, having machines that turn off when not in use is easy to configure, which I never managed on AWS.

> which I never managed on AWS

I haven't looked at it recently, but App Runner could do a few of Fly.io esque things (but slightly more expensive): https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/

> Not as flexible as AWS

Today, Fly.io is more or less in the same market as Lightsail, not AWS. And when you compare it to Lightsail, it blows it away.

And when you compare it to Lightsail, it blows it away.

This is a bit of a confusing sentence because there are so many pronouns. Do all of the "it"s refer to Fly.io?

> And when you compare [fly.io] to Lightsail, [fly.io] blows [Lightsail] away.

Did you count reliability into your assesment here? I'm reading about Fly.io outages multiple times a year, whereas Lightsail seem to be as stable as AWS EC2.

DigitalOcean has been doing this for years, and their value proposition is unmatched IMO

For $5 you get:

Latest gen CPUs and RAM

HTTPS

DDoS protection

Cloudflare CDN

Autoscale

Competent support

I'd say the best part is the predictable monthly prices

And while most people probably don't care, they are an established public company, so there is more chance they will exist in 10 years

are global r/w token permissions still a thing, or did the token scopes thing finally come out of beta?

also, my experience with support was not the same as yours. they were utterly useless for the most part.

for a personal web dev (or similar) project, like, i agree, they’ve got good value.

but having worked in a small biz where DO was what they built everything on — no. bad idea. spend more. use aws (graviton ec2 instances)/azure.

the $5 droplet is underpowered and can't run anything substantial. it's just the price to get you in the door.

It doesn't really need to run anything "substantial" though. Running some janky wordpress site with some scabbed-on ecommerce customizations is like 50% of the internet.

a 1vCPU 512mb instance is plenty for most base cases. Maybe you need one additional machine to act as a background worker. I am sure there are some noisy neighbors but to say its underpowered is silly.

I'm calling it underpowered because the $5 one had trouble running my custom ssh daemon. ssh! the cryptography for that shouldn't chug down the server I'm renting from them. a bigger instance from them isn't having the same problems.

you wouldn't be able to run anything substantial with that kind of budget

but GO and pocketbase is on record for supporting 10k concurrent requests per second on low powered VPS

I have asked this multiple times but is anyone really using edge compute and getting value out of it? I am certain there are cases but I have not seen any of them written up before.

We have an embeddable audio player served globally with very low latency. This wouldn't be possible without edge compute/data.

Depends on what you mean by edge compute, but you probably are.

5G towers are a ton of compute on the edge to secure and protect the traffic passing through them.

Or if by edge you mean having stuff close to your consumers, every non trivial operation does that.

How is it not obvious based on the thread at hand, fly.io.

And no not every nontrivial operation does it to the extreme of an envisioned fly.io deployment.

I have an SSR Astro project. Using Fly makes my project fast.

For dynamic data I use SWR.

I could use Cloudflare workers but it doesn’t play so nice with Astro.

I also have a “form submission service” where I receive a Post and send an email.

I need maximum uptime to avoid revenue loss.

It’s a go service so I deploy ~6 machines across the US to ensure I don’t drop any requests.

I haven’t had downtime in years.

If half your customers are in new your and half in sidney it makes you app faster if you run it in both places.

There is a lot of things we do for our users that we don't need (no one "needs" SPA etc). But if it is easy to make your app faster for your users, why not?

And it is easier than AWS to deploy.

I would take edge compute if it's free and easy. That's fly.io's value prop.

In a world where much web browsing starts with ACK SYN ACK, it is nice if the server is close to you.

I typed fly launch, fly deploy and my node.js project was deployed. So I guess hobby projects?

I am going to go out on a limb and say there is no real value prop to fly.io. I could completely be wrong but it always feels like the modern MongoDB. Everyone wants to use it but I am not sure they are extracting value from it and instead its a shiny toy that is fun to build from.

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