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by manigandham 1802 days ago
Fly has become a serious contender. I remember the early days where they were more of a reverse proxy with javascript workers but have since evolved into a fantastic platform, solving for both compute and data.

I might have to launch a startup just to get a chance to use them.
1 comments
gingerlime 1802 days ago
yes it looks really interesting. I wonder about the reverse proxy (with caching) aspect since we’re looking at caching some of our Rails pages, and to purge them would mean upgrade to Cloudflare enterprise which is expensive for us. Is fly a more flexible CDN contender then? or would we be better off with bunny or keycdn for this use-case? where does the reverse proxy route fit in this picture?
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manigandham 1801 days ago
Fly is no longer a CDN or reverse proxy. It lets you run anything packaged into container in several regions around the world and serve traffic to them all through a single domain.

You can build a CDN on top but if you just need basic CDN features then you should probably look at something else. Cloudflare allows purging all of the content, or individual URLs, for free through the UI or API. You only need enterprise for the more advanced tag-based purging. You can also look at Fastly which is another configurable CDN. BunnyCDN is also good. Start simple and then move as you need more.

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gingerlime 1801 days ago
Thank you.

Yes, we need more advanced purging functionality. Enterprise seems like the logical next step, but the price increase is hard to swallow. Using something like Bunny/Fastly etc can save us a bundle, but then we're kinda ditching all the other built-in features. I guess that's exactly the Cloudflare play to get you started cheap...

I wasn't aware fly evolved from a CDN. I just saw your comment and the docs mentioning speeding Heroku apps, running nginx proxy, openresty etc, so was curious if it's something worth looking into.

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