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by chairmanwow1 835 days ago
My startup used Fly for almost a year. The core feature of code to deployed code in less than a minute is beautiful. Spinning up / down new nodes for backfills takes seconds.

But the company feels a little immature. Once our API server became unreachable in Fly for 48 hours. I'm not sure if it was my fault for getting config wrong or if they just had another "silent" failure. They have a "db" product, but it's "not managed postgres". Would get consistent disconnections from that. Just feels weird for them to add a top level noun in their cli for postgres and then limit the extent it's a feature they support.

API access to their core service would frequently go down and leave us waiting to deploy new service fixes.

I miss the deployment experience, but I'm frankly happier with Cloud Run on GCP. Just way fewer "surprises" and much more complete documentation.

3 comments

The deployment experience is awesome, but for me[0] the killer feature of Fly.io is their Anycast network and features such as FLY_REPLAY and LiteFS that make clusering a breeze[1].

It's wild to me how little support VPS providers have for reducing latency of backend services for users. None of them support Anycast, and there are very few GeoDNS options (it adds more complexity besides).

I just wish Fly.io had cheaper data transfer, since I'm currently having to re-implement (poorly) a lot of their features for an ngrok-like service I'm working on.

[0]: using them for https://lastlogin.io

[1]: Here's all the fly-specific code necessary to run LastLogin in a globally distributed way: https://github.com/lastlogin-io/obligator/blob/37f75cc861f1b...

Fly looks great to me, though I've never had a chance to use it. For what it's worth though, Cloud Run on GCP is one of my top 3 favorite infrastructure/deployment tools, so you're setting the bar pretty high.
> so you're setting the bar pretty high

Why would anyone choose a provider that is inferior (apart from toying)?

I mainly read two kind of stories from fly.io. Their promotional, but well written and interesting technical blogs like this one and stories about issues with their services and miscommunication. So, despite liking their blogs I don't consider using it.

Part of the reason I stick with Fly.io is because I want a rock solid version of what they do to exist, and they're the most likely people to eventually get there.

That said, I've had very few issues with their platform, and I don't think it's ever caused downtime for my (admittedly very small) service.

Cloud Run is pretty slick... services, batch jobs, easy to deploy, very flexible.
Same exact experience, a year on Fly but moved to GCP (GKE in our case for reasons) a month or two ago. Super slick when it worked, but that wasn’t often enough…