[melony]

Free tier of CloudFlare Pages/functions runs the app at the edge by default. For Fly.io, this scaling has to be manually configured for both the app and the DB. Are there any plans to offer it by default for the free tier? It is hard to evaluate the benefits of having the data center near the end user when it is not offered out of the box, especially since all the Fly.io blog posts talk about how great their service is for HTML-over-the-wire UIs like Phoenix live view and Rails Hotwire.

[dmw_ng]

You can squeeze a hell of a lot more perf out of general purpose compute that is maybe an extra 15 ms away than one-shot workers lacking any in-RAM persistence, or ability to do much more than limited local k/v lookups. The equation is totally different.

Many workers I've seen (or written) start by reaching out over the Internet to another backend. There goes most of your edge benefit almost immediately.

[mrkurt]

We'd like to automate this! We've made it nearly transparent for Rails apps, and almost as transparent for Phoenix apps, but there's a lot of work to do. Right now with Rails you:

1. Provision your DB

2. Add regions

3. Add our Ruby gem to your Rails app

4. Deploy Rails

5. Set the same regions for the Rails app

And it just works. Phoenix is close but we haven't quite polished up the Hex library yet.

I think being transparent about regions is a feature! We can definitely automate most of those steps away, but the region you're running in will never be obfuscated. CDNs are _notorious_ for placing content and features where it's cheapest for them and I think that's gross.

Whether we can make it free or not is an open question. Ultimately there's a cost to storing a bunch of redundant data. We have ideas for suspending and resuming read replicas, it's just complicated!

At the moment we're a pretty good place to deploy your full stack app for free. And we're a very good place to cheaply run a full stack app in multiple regions.