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by babelfish 1778 days ago
fly.io has a fantastic engineering blog. Has anyone used them as a customer (enterprise or otherwise) and have any thoughts?
6 comments

Yes, I'm using it. I deploy a TypeScript project that runs in a pretty straightforward node Dockerfile. The build just works - and it's smart too. If I don't have a Docker daemon locally, it creates a remote one and does some WireGuard magic. We don't have customers on this yet, but I'm actively sending demos and rely on it.

Hopefully I'll get to keep working on projects that can make use of it because it feels like a polished 2021 version of Heroku era dev experience to me. Also, full disclosure, Kurt tried to get me to use it in YC W20 - but I didn't listen really until over a year later.

One of my side projects is a DNS hosting service, SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com/).

I moved my authoritative DNS name servers over to Fly a few months ago. After some initial teething issues with Fly's UDP support (which were quickly resolved) it's been smooth sailing.

The Fly UX via the flyctl command-line app is excellent, very Heroku-like. Only downside is it makes me mad when I have to fight the horrendous AWS tooling in my day job.

I run my own worldwide anycast network and still end up deploying stuff to Fly because it is so much easier.

The folks who actually run the network for them are super clueful and basically the best in the industry.

just started to use them for an elixir/phoenix project. multi region with distributed nodes just works. feels almost magically after all the aws work I've done the past few years.
What’s magically?

I was under the impression that fly.io today (though they are working on it) doesn’t do anything unique to make hosting elixir/Phoenix app easier.

See this comment by the fly.io team.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27704852

I still wouldn't say we do any magic Elixir stuff; rather, our platform just happens to have a combination of features (particularly edge delivery for stuff like LiveView and zero-config private networking for clustering) that make Elixir apps sing.

But we've got full-time people working on Elixir now, too; we'll see where that goes. We've still got Elixir limerence here. :)

Hey Thomas, weren’t you running Latacora last time I checked?
I haven't been at Latacora for a while now.
They're not doing anything special to make Elixir specifically better yet, but their private networking is already amazing for it - you can cluster across arbitrary regions completely trivially. It's a really good fit for Elixir clustering as-is even without anything specially built for it. I have no idea how you'd do multi-region clustering in AWS but I'm certain it'd be a lot harder.
I read their blogs and I visit their site every new project I start but it just hasn't clicked with me yet.

Tinkering has been great but the addon style pricing scares the jeebs out of me (my wallet), I just assume I can't afford it for now and spin up a DO droplet. The droplet is probably more expensive for my use case but call it ADHD tax haha, at least it's capped

I've used them in the past. All I can say is that the support was (and probably still is) fantastic.