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by benatkin 1159 days ago
This makes me think of DotCloud, the precursor to Docker Inc. The idea that you can run anything has been around for a while. I don't see how Fly.io is especially good for Elixir. It seems to be about delivering reliable resources for each service, and it works no matter the web framework, as long as you have a PaaS that's geared towards running arbitrary OCI images. These posts seem a lot like the content on the DigitalOcean site, except they're written by staffers instead of freelancers. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digit...
2 comments
peregrine 1159 days ago
One of the interesting bits about Fly is we have our own servers distributed globally and connected via wireguard. Which makes it is trivial to setup Elixir/Erlang distribution globally, and most importantly, close to your customers. While its not a magic bullet it is pretty amazing to type a few commands have a globally deployed and directly distributed application.

Further Fly builds its Dashboard internally with Phoenix LiveView. We want the Phoenix and Ruby and Laravel and more communities soon, to grow because we believe if they grow, we will too.

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benatkin 1159 days ago
That's just internal networking isn't it? VPC on the big clouds, DigitalOcean, and Vultr. Private Services on render.com.

I remember when Fly.io used to tout Firecracker but that is just a KVM engine, along with QEMU used on a zillion hosts.

What I'd like to see are customer success stories.

Edit: looks like you have to set up your own cross-region links on DigitalOcean and Vultr. So that interests me somewhat. :)

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mrdoops 1159 days ago
Elixir does distribution and concurrency really well, so Fly making multi-region deployments easy makes it a good fit.
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benatkin 1159 days ago
So is Fly good for small sites or is it good for huge sites? What's a big customer? For small sites my idea of a multi-region deployment is a single-region deployment that works in multiple regions thanks to the magic of the Internet.

I see this which mostly seems to be content sites. https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/paas/fly-io/ Same on the first forum result: https://community.fly.io/t/customer-success-stories/4882

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mrdoops 1159 days ago
I'd say its good for both.

Small sites because it is low-bandwidth to figure out how to use. Time is money and if I'm just tinkering on the weekend I don't really want to learn Kubernetes or the labyrinth that is AWS; I just want to ship an app.

Big sites because your users get routed to the node closest to them and again you can do this without a lot of time investment. For Elixir I just wire up Libcluster and my nodes can talk to each other.

I really want GPUs on Fly soon though. Just take my money Kurt. (I hear they're working on it)

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