We're not a K8s vendor. We're a lower-level platform than that. If all you care about is K8s, and no part of the rest of our platform is interesting to you --- the global distribution and Anycast, the fly-proxy features, the Machines API --- we're not a natural fit for what you're doing.
We were surprised at how FKS turned out, which is part of why we decided to launch it as a feature and all of why we wrote it up this way. That's all.
It might now be more accurate to say "You were not a k8s vendor", but now you are based on
> If K8s is important for your project, and that’s all that’s been holding you back from trying out Fly.io, we’ve spent the past several months building something for you.
If it's fundamentally different, maybe you shouldn't call it Kubernetes, perhaps a Kubernetes API compatible alternative?
fwiw/context, I use GKE and also many of the low-level services on GCP
Is Fly supposed to be simpler for the average developer?
Are any of the cloud provided managed K8s offerings just K8s under the covers? I’ve always assumed all of them shim the K8s api onto other more bespoke orchestration systems.
Most are pretty much actually k8s, though they tend to have different ways of handling the masters, my understanding is that it's the same k8s binaries and code
What I've seen is the k8s APIs working their way into other systems like cloud functions and servers, so you can use the same Yaml across vendors and products. This is further solidifying k8s APIs as an industry standard
Searching "managed kubernetes providers" is a good starting point to learn about the various offerings
I’ve looked extensively at the documentation for gke autopilot (a system I use extensively) and haven’t found any documentation on how they orchestrate those clusters under the covers.
I’ve always assumed it was a plugin to borg, not a different fleet orchestrator. Not to be overtly needy, but do you have a link to docs that contradicts that?
It is definitely not a plugin for borg. Borg is totally different api (source - i was borg sre). Afaik it’s actually vanilla k8s apiserver with some shimmed bespoke storage but it’s not really documented anywhere. You can test that fact using kubectl proxy though
I'm excited about this as a way to configure my Fly.io apps in a more declarative way. One of my biggest gripes about Fly.io is that there's a lightly documented bespoke config format to learn (fly.toml), and at the same time there's a ton of stuff you can't even do with that config file.
I love Kubernetes because the .yaml gives you have the entire story, but I'd _really_ love to get that experience w/o having to run Kubernetes. (Even in most managed k8s setups, I've found the need to run lots of non-managed things inside the cluster to make it user-friendly.)
k8s has become a standard api and platform for running apps, having a * on it makes the implementation an outlier from the standard, not normally considered a good thing because you have to be aware of the nuanced differences.
It's more about good abstractions and APIs for running applications in the cloud. Cloud providers are the one's offering the APIs and abstractions we use, and increasingly putting k8s abst/apis at the forefront, because that is where industry has moved to
> People and companies use it because it makes this easier in several areas
Compute on demand is significantly more complex using k8s than what most companies already pay for from their own cloud provider, AWS is the industry standard for this purpose, followed by Azure, then TF, then Pulumi maybe.
We were surprised at how FKS turned out, which is part of why we decided to launch it as a feature and all of why we wrote it up this way. That's all.