[corobo]

Is this still a limitation for Fly k8s?

> A Fly Volume is a slice of an NVMe drive on the physical server your Fly App runs on. It’s tied to that hardware.

Does the k8s have any kind of storage provisioning that allows pods with persistent storage (e.g. databases) to just do their thing without me worrying about it or do I still need to handle disks potentially vanishing?

I think this is the only hold-up that stops me actually using Fly. I don't know what happens if my machine crashes and is brought back on different hardware. Presumably the data is just not there anymore.

Is everyone else using an off-site DB like Planetscale? Or just hoping it's an issue that never comes up, w/ backups just in case? Or maybe setting up full-scale DB clusters on Fly so it's less of a potential issue? Or 'other'?

[tptacek]

Not speaking for the FKS case, but in general for the platform: when you associate an app with a volume, your app is anchored to the hardware the volume is on (people used to use tiny volumes as a way to express hard-locked region affinity when we were still using Nomad). So if your Fly Machine crashes, it's going to come back on the same physical as the volume lives on.

We back up volumes to off-net block storage, and, under the hood, we can seamlessly migrate a volume to another physical (the way we do it is interesting, and we should write it up, but it's still also an important part of our work sample hiring process, which is why we haven't). So your app could move from one physical to another; the data would come with it.

On the other hand: Fly Volumes are attached storage. They're not a SAN system like EBS, they're not backed onto a 50-9s storage engine like S3. If a physical server throws a rod, you can lose data. This is why, for instance, if you boot up a Fly Postgres cluster here and ask us to do it with only one instance, we'll print a big red warning. (When you run a multi-node Postgres cluster, or use LiteFS Cloud with SQLite, you'd doing at the application layer what a more reliable storage layer would do at the block layer).