[netshade]

I am a current Fly customer (personal and work), and have been happy with the service. Will likely be trying this out. That said, the marketing tone of this final part of the blog:

> More to come! We’re itching to see just how many different ways this bet might pay off. Or: we’ll perish in flames! Either way, it’ll be fun to watch.

is like nails on the chalkboard for me.

[tick_tock_tick]

Why? If you're using something like Fly you should 100% always have a fallback plan ready. You are gambling using smaller players to get cheaper services or some other benefit the big players don't offer in exchange for the very real possibility of a random day they announce 30 days til they permanently shutdown with zero migration path.

I don't think it's in poor taste to acknowledge exactly what everyone should understand and be prepared for.

[netshade]

You can communicate those ideas specifically without hiding it beneath the veneer of relatability. The entire post started with this bit:

> But, come on: you never took us too seriously about K8s, right? K8s is hard for us to use, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great fit for what you’re building. We’ve been clear about that all along, right? Sure we have!

which already starts the post in a bad space for the reader. I have cognitive whiplash from what is intended. "We DON'T like Kubernets UNTIL WE DO but then WE MIGHT NOT IN THE FUTURE". Clear meaning is far more appreciated.

[tptacek]

We're not trying to sell you so much as we are trying to put you in the headspace we are in building this stuff. Your summary (we DON'T until we DO but MAYBE NOT) does feel pretty true to life!

[tptacek]

Interesting! We're mostly not kidding about that. We launched in 2020 with a scheduler that looks a lot like how K8s works†. We ran into scaling issues. Instead of scaling a globally coordinated "eye in the sky" scheduler, like Nomad and K8s offers, we relaxed a constraint ("when you ask to run a job, we'll move heaven and earth to put it somewhere") and wound up with a totally different scheduling model (a market-based system that bids on resources, where requests to place jobs are all effectively fill-or-kill limit orders).

This was a bet. We're bullish about this bet! Even without K8s, having core scheduling be "less reliable" but with a simpler, more responsive interface puts us in a position to do some of the "move heaven and earth" work that K8s and Nomad do in simpler components (like: we can write Elixir code to drive the scheduler).

But it might not pay off! That's what makes it a bet.

† (see: comments on this thread asking why overengineered and wrote out own version of stuff; the expectation that you'd run a platform like Fly.io on standard K8s or Nomad is pretty strong!).

[lkjadflkj4]

Some people have a cheeky sense of humor. Counterpoint: I'm ok with it.

[roozbeh18]

I made the same bet with cloudways which is now owned by digitalocean. they filled a gap for me, and I was ok if they decided to close shop; I am glad it didn't go that direction, and they are part of a bigger company that also was once a small company, but they are now publicly traded. you make your bets...