[melony]

There is nothing easy about them, cheaper yes (only for the lower instances), but not easier. Until they have first-class, evergreen, support for Heroku buildpacks, they are a subpar replacement.

They are also missing a proper managed database with point-in-time backups through the web UI like those offered by most proper PaaS services.

[mrkurt]

We aren't going to support Heroku buildpacks. We are working to make more frameworks easy to launch with minimal configurations. Which means – hiring people to work specifically on those frameworks + docs + builds.

We did bake nixpacks into our CLI recently, they seem better for our particular environment than buildpacks. Railway.app did a great job with these: https://nixpacks.com/docs/getting-started

We're working on managed databases, but we're not doing them like Heroku did. We just launched a preview of managed Redis with Upstash: https://fly.io/docs/reference/redis/

This seems like the future of managed databases on a platform like ours. There are companies that build very good managed database services. We're getting to the size where these people will work with us. Getting well managed DBs onto the platform is basically what I'm spending all my time on these days.

Incidentally, we're a lot cheaper than Heroku because we run our own infrastructure.

[samwillis]

I’m sure you already have something in the pipeline for fully managed Postgres on Fly (I Really want something Heroku Postgres like, but on Fly). If not, have you reached out to Crunchy Data? They seem to have a solid product.

If you happen to have a service beta testing anything I would be interested in joining it.

[maxioatic]

Do you have plans for Rust (and specifically web frameworks like actix-web)? I see Rust on your main site under "Use the Tech You Love" but there's no dedicated docs.

[mrkurt]

Yep! If all goes well, we'll have people working on Rust "last mile" UX sometime in 2023. We all use Rust, we just so happen to write Dockerfiles when we do.

[maxioatic]

That's awesome! That's how I've used it so far and it works great, no complaints.

ps. are those people already at fly? shameless plug - would love to work on things like that.

[pyentropy]

> point-in-time backups through the web UI

Is `fly postgres create --name restoredDb --snapshot-id backupId` that hard that's it's a deal breaker?

> support for Heroku buildpacks

I haven't tried it but there's some buildpack support: https://fly.io/docs/reference/configuration/#builder

[melony]

It's not a managed database, if things break at 3am, you have to fix it yourself. The buildpacks are an afterthought using third-parties. A real evergreen solution will track the official Heroku solution (since fly.io doesn't even bother to document their buildpacks) to the nearest day. The whole point of the P in PaaS is that somebody else does the DevOps. If I have to do so much DevOps, then there's no point in adopting Fly. I am getting the impression that users here only care about their shiny blogposts and content marketing, versus the actual experience as a business user.

[mrkurt]

I'm going to make a point here that might be contentious: you are asking for Heroku. Heroku is going away because it no longer works as a business.

We are not Heroku. It is ok for you to not like what we're doing. We're building something different. We've never even _said_ we were a Heroku alternative, we just liked their UX for deploying apps and decided to roll with something similar.

[cucho]

> Heroku is going away because it no longer works as a business.

I would rather say 'It no longer works as a business for Salesforce.'

[ericpauley]

While I can't agree with melony on buildpacks (shipping OCI containers straight from our CI to Fly has been a game changer), I do agree on the importance of fully-managed databases.

Our app has two components, a backend on Heroku and distributed frontend on Fly. The backend relies on a managed database, and I have not had to touch it in 6 years. Heroku does a great job providing confidence that the managed database will Just Work. The current Fly Postgres offering doesn't provide this confidence.

[mrkurt]

I also agree about the importance of fully managed databases!

We shipped "automated" Postgres because we couldn't get any fully managed DB providers to pay attention to us when we were small. I expect we'll have an option running on Fly infrastructure in the next six months.

Our Redis is fully managed, so you can get an idea of how it might play out: https://fly.io/docs/reference/redis/

[pier25]

It's not Fly's fault if Heroku decided to remove their free tier. They do have buildpacks for the most popular stacks. Eg: You can deploy a Node app really with just `fly launch`.

As for the managed DBs, one of their founders was from Compose, so yeah they know how these things work. But AFAIK Fly doesn't have much interest in DBs, their focus is really in VMs.

[Karupan]

Looks like you just want Heroku. And I’ve never seen the Fly team mention that they are aiming to be a Heroku replacement. So maybe it’s just not for you?