[ngrilly]

It sounds like you’re commenting in general terms without having looked at what Fly.io is actually doing. Yes, choosing the right abstractions is the problem, and what makes Fly.io really interesting is that they chose different ones. It’s really well explained in their docs and blog posts.

[ipaddr]

Having to read through docs and blog posts to understand what unique abstractions doesn't help those asking. I've read through docs, blog posts, etc. It's for developers who don't want to setup and maintain an environment. Other providers offer this. You end up paying far more than a five dollar droplet in most cases and a lot more than the free Oracle tier offers but much less compared to big cloud like AWS. They offer a free tier and a community helping onboarding. The goal is ecosystem lock-in and they provide enough to win over a certain group in the middle. The fear is the freebies given today will be paid for by the lock-in effects tomorrow.

[tptacek]

We host Docker containers. As you aptly observe: you can boot up a Docker container just about anywhere. I'm not seeing the lock-in.

[ipaddr]

It's the ecosystem things like Upstash Redis Database, edgeDB

[tptacek]

That's Redis, Redis, Postgres, and a database we don't do anything with, for those following along with this.

Unless "Upstash Redis Database" is one thing? In which case, that's "Redis, and a database we don't do anything with".

I'm still not seeing the lock-in.

Whatever EdgeDB is: we're happy if you run it here! If it has like, a company running it as a service, we're very happy to talk to them, too. But we're going out of our way to avoid weird custom services, like Amazon's 19 different messaging services, that have platform-specific APIs. Our APIs are Docker, IPv6, DNS, Redis, and Postgres. Our Postgres is literally just an app running on Fly.io; you can run it yourself if you like --- or, I guess, run it somewhere else.