[HN Gopher] Free Postgres databases for small projects
___________________________________________________________________
Free Postgres databases for small projects
Author : mikeyhew
Score : 769 points
Date : 2022-01-21 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fly.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fly.io)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| We are going to migrate to Fly.io very soon. We are very excited
| about the prospect of Elixir, Phoenix and Liveview running close
| to our users with NONE of the javascript headaches. I've hit the
| eject button on javascript and won't be coming back.
|
| This free tier of database will make it easier for everyone to
| test the waters at Fly.
| hbagdi wrote:
| Fly's developer experience is really sweet. Do you have plans to
| open up your API for provisioning on the fly? We've use-cases
| which require dynamic provisioning of new deployments as well as
| mutating existing deployments based on APIs we offer to our
| customers.
| mrkurt wrote:
| The API is open. If you spelunk through flyctl you can see it
| using GraphQL for everything: https://github.com/flyctl
| sanketsaurav wrote:
| Including free storage in the free plan is a good strategy. Aside
| from small projects, I bet it'll make it much easier for people
| looking to host their production workloads to try before buy.
| Love this!
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| I'm so glad Fly exists. Every other edge focused thing out there
| I'm aware of are "serverless" which these days basically means
| they charge per request.
|
| That's fine for a lot of use cases, but the unit economics of the
| per request pricing model means it's really hard to operate a
| predictably sustainable (i.e. profitable) business without also
| charging our customers on a usage basis, or enforcing limits on
| usage, neither of which is ideal for maximizing engagement as
| incentives are no longer aligned.
|
| Fly just gives us compute at the edge for a predictable price per
| unit of actual compute resources as opposed to requests, and
| gives us freedom to serve as much traffic as we can min-max onto
| those resources, like we could with traditional cloud compute.
|
| This provides much better unit economics for many kinds of
| applications, at the cost of having to manage the scaling
| ourselves. But because the option exists, we can make this
| tradeoff on a case-by-case basis, which is so much better than if
| all we had was "serverless" stuff at the edge and had to choose
| between just low latency across the globe vs good unit economics.
| mooreds wrote:
| For a company that says it makes it super easy to deploy a
| container image and mentions that all you need to do "Write
| your code, package it into a Docker image, deploy it to Fly's
| platform"[0], they sure have a dearth of documentation on how
| to deploy an existing docker container.
|
| I am not sure if I'm missing something or what, but here's
| where I looked: * googled 'docker fly' and a
| blog post that references docker but as far as I can see
| doesn't have instructions on deploying docker images shows
| up[1]. * their getting started guide[2], called a 'speed
| run' which has all kinds of CLI commands but doesn't actually
| show how I'd pick a docker image. * their quickstart
| docs[3], which outline how to deploy all manner of
| applications, except for, you guessed it, an existing docker
| image. * scanned the menu of their docs, and didn't see
| anything.
|
| I really want to like this service, as we have (at $CURJOB) an
| app packaged as a docker image that it'd be awesome to set up
| to run on Fly.io, especially with the multi-region postgresql.
|
| What the heck am I missing? Can I just not read? Do I just need
| to install the CLI and all shall be made clear?
|
| 0: https://fly.io/docs/introduction/
|
| 1: https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/
|
| 2: https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/
|
| 3: https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/
| onphonenow wrote:
| I agree - could be clearer!
| mrkurt wrote:
| You know, you're not really missing anything, we just don't
| connect the dots very well.
|
| Install CLI, run `fly launch` in a directory with a
| Dockerfile, and it should just work.
|
| Most of our users don't start with a Docker image though,
| they start with Phoenix. What you're seeing is a little bit
| of indecisiveness in how we target the docs.
| Serow225 wrote:
| I'd really recommend adding a section to this* page
| something like "existing Docker containers" ! I would not
| have found out that it's possible based on your current
| docs layout.
|
| * https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/
|
| Also, I noticed that the Speedrun page a) in step 3,
| doesn't tell you to CD into your source code directory
| before running the launch command to autobuild, and b) is
| missing links to all the autobuild supported languages
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| I just did this with an application I haven't touch in
| years. The deployment worked on the first try. A few clicks
| and I had TLS certificates. I'm sold!
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| I can't live with this typo. s/touch/touched
| [deleted]
| piaste wrote:
| > Install CLI, run `fly launch` in a directory with a
| Dockerfile, and it should just work.
|
| Does this build the Docker image locally and send it to
| Fly.io, or does it send the whole build context to Fly.io
| and build the image remotely?
| mrkurt wrote:
| If you have Docker running locally, it does a local build
| and pushes to our registry. If you don't have docker
| running locally, it launches Docker on our
| infrastructure, sends it the context, and does a remote
| build.
|
| You can control this with "fly deploy --remote-only" and
| "fly deploy --local-only". Don't use both, it might cause
| a paradox.
| Serow225 wrote:
| Any chance of getting autobuilder support for Rust? :)
|
| What about same for .NET? (and I suppose some people would
| care about Java,Kotlin,Swift ;)
|
| I don't have to deal with containers with my current
| infrastructure, and it would be nice if I didn't just to be
| able to use Fly--I find containers to be a PITA.
|
| Thanks! I'm super jazzed about Fly :D
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > I don't have to deal with containers with my current
| infrastructure
|
| Just curious, which infrastructure is that, and does it
| have built-in build support for Rust?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Yes there's a good chance for all of these! You can post
| on community.fly.io if you'd like and get a headstart.
| People have prebuilt Dockerfiles laying around for
| everything (and we have lost of Rust stuff).
|
| We use Dockerfiles kind of like make files. Once you have
| one that works, you don't need to think about it anymore.
| mooreds wrote:
| Thanks! I'd rather run with a defined image, is there a way
| to do that?
|
| Here's the image:
| https://hub.docker.com/r/fusionauth/fusionauth-app/tags
| (supports ARM or x86).
|
| Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019258 shows,
| I think, how to do that.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Ah, for this you want "fly launch", it'll tell you it's
| going to generate a config file for you.
|
| Edit the config so the `internal_port` is right for the
| app you're running, then `fly deploy -i
| fusionauth/fusionauth-app` and you should be good.
| pmarreck wrote:
| What are your ARM plans, if any?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We have no ARM plans, but a strong desire. The really
| good ARM stuff is locked up within Apple and Amazon,
| though. I'm really hoping an independent chip vendor
| ships a compelling and broadly available ARM platform we
| can use for servers. They all keep killing their
| products. :/
| tyingq wrote:
| This type of humble and helpful answer from a vendor is
| refreshing.
| cornel_io wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why target Phoenix users as your primary
| audience when you serve generic Docker users easily as
| well, given that they're likely a 10x or more segment? Are
| you just marketing to a tighter target audience to start,
| or is your platform/UI specifically optimized to support
| Phoenix?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The Phoenix guy works for them, so I'm sure they have a
| lot of organic interest from Phoenix users. It's like how
| you don't have to use Next.js on Vercel, but...
| mrkurt wrote:
| We started with generic Docker! The Phoenix focus has
| been very helpful, though. Docker apps are incredibly
| broad, other than "it's really easy to launch a
| container", it's hard to define why we're especially good
| at Docker containers.
|
| With Phoenix, we can say: run your fullstack Phoenix app
| on Fly and your users get sub 40ms responses from
| LiveView. When responses are that fast, you can write
| less code and still build really dynamic applications.
| And we can give those devs a really nice launch
| experience: https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/14689
| 98944009166849
|
| We're getting to the point where we can expand this
| focus. The infrastructure works great for many types of
| apps. The launch UX could be good for every full stack
| framework with enough people.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| You're right, they should make that much more clear. I'd
| expect it to be on the left side menu, just like they have
| all the "Run a [language] app".
|
| Based on your first link [0], I saw,
|
| > You can run most applications with a Dockerfile using the
| flyctl command.
|
| With that, I looked over the left-side menu, and clicked
| `flyctl`[1], since it seems that's what you'd need to use to
| deploy an existing app with Docker. After that, I clicked on
| "Launch an App" [2], which shows help for the `flyctl launch`
| subcommand, including a parameter `--dockerfile`. I think
| that's how you would deploy an existing app with docker?
|
| [0] https://fly.io/docs/introduction/ [1]
| https://fly.io/docs/flyctl/ [2]
| https://fly.io/docs/flyctl/launch/
| mooreds wrote:
| Thanks! As mentioned in sibling comment, I want to use an
| existing docker image, so probably `flyctl launch --image
| $NAME`.
| leerob wrote:
| Sounds like Fly is moving to usage-based pricing:
| https://twitter.com/mrkurt/status/1475310487864848391
| mrkurt wrote:
| This is true, but we aren't going to bill per request. We
| really can't, since we support arbitrary UDP and TCP
| services.
|
| I don't really want to promise anything we haven't shipped
| yet. But my perfect cloud service (a) charges me when VMs are
| alive and (b) gives me the tools I need to
| create/remove/stop/start/suspend/resume VMs based on either
| network activity or metrics.
|
| One flaw of Fly.io right now is that it's relatively
| expensive to run a side project in 10+ regions. Most apps
| benefit from 10+ regions, but $50/mo to try it out is
| prohibitive. We want to make this more accessible.
| xfer wrote:
| > charges me when VMs are alive and
|
| You still need that capacity, don't you? You will have to
| adjust the pricing but i doubt it will cost either of us
| any less, whether you allocate it.
| mrkurt wrote:
| The nice thing about mapping peoples apps to overpowered
| hardware is that it flattens bursts. We need capacity
| for, say, 10% of apps to burst at any given time.
|
| The nice thing about spreading hardware around the world
| is that we have excess capacity wherever it's dark. If
| you're doing latency insensitive work like batch jobs, we
| can schedule it somewhere that would otherwise be idle.
|
| Aggregate capacity is smaller than the sum of the
| individual apps capacity requirements. So we both
| benefit.
| mike_d wrote:
| Is arbitrary UDP working now?
|
| I don't fault you guys for being a growing startup (we have
| all been there), but it would be awesome to have a way to
| flag an issue as "email me when this is fixed so I can come
| back."
| tptacek wrote:
| Arbitrary UDP has worked since we launched UDP; it's
| never had a port filter or anything.
| mike_d wrote:
| My bad, it was v6 UDP I was thinking of?
|
| I'm a big fan of Fly and have one medium-sized app
| deployed to it. Just waiting on this specific issue
| before deploying more: https://community.fly.io/t/allow-
| non-root-users-to-write-to-...
| tptacek wrote:
| You're not crazy! We still don't do v6 UDP (there's no
| good reason for us not to, but it'll be a week of
| rebuilding a BPF engine while the plane's still in the
| air, so this task never hits the top of our stack and
| won't until someone really pressures us on it). Full
| honesty! That's how we roll on HN. :)
| onphonenow wrote:
| I actually worry you are undervaluing yourselves. $50 is
| fine for 10 regions as a data point from where I sit though
| I wouldn't object to less
| mrkurt wrote:
| Oh don't you worry. We can extract large sums of money
| from big companies.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Big places have bet pretty big on docker.
|
| Docker also seems like the quickest option to come out of
| AWS (ie, ECS or friends) and try fly - so I'd continue
| chasing a bit of a docker story if you could (even just
| in docs -> getting going with Docker).
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Would love to know what kind of approach you're taking for
| usage-based. Cold start every time, or some
| container/criu/VM suspend/resume magic?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Can you scale each region based on usage i.e. have a huge
| server in US or Europe and a tiny one in a market you don't
| have many users in? fly.io is really an incredible piece of
| work, I'll probably just default to it as I am a massive
| Elixir fanboy :-)
|
| As others have said $50 seems a very low starting point but
| if you can make it cheaper why not, just means you've
| helped more people onto your service and they will grow
| with you.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Autoscaling and balancing regions is something we
| launched with, but it ended up not making much sense. Our
| load balance sends traffic to the next nearest region
| when an app is too busy. It's usually better to spread
| capacity around to lower latency for users, and then eat
| the additional latency when a region gets overloaded.
|
| In most cases "the next nearest region" is less than 15ms
| away.
| cxr wrote:
| > it's really hard to operate a predictably sustainable (i.e.
| profitable) business [... with other providers]. Fly just gives
| us compute at the edge for a predictable price per unit of
| actual compute resources as opposed to requests, and gives us
| freedom to serve as much traffic as we can min-max onto those
| resources, like we could with traditional cloud compute
|
| The praise on the subject of predictability is interesting,
| given perennial concerns about uncapped vs capped usage charges
| (with any cloud provider), but esp. in light of past Fly-
| specific comments that "putting work into features specifically
| to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail
| a company".
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699221>
| mrkurt wrote:
| We ended up shipping a "cap your costs" feature, we just did
| it with prepaid credits. If you buy prepaid credits instead
| of adding a credit card to your account, we can't bill you
| more than you've prepaid. The downside is that you have to
| prepay $25 to use anything at all.
|
| My comment could have been better. Our business model is
| predicated on making it cheap to use services and easy to
| incrementally scale up. We probably won't build features to
| cap usage of things directly, but it makes total sense to
| deactivate apps when credits run out.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Serverless pricing model doesn't have to be transferred to your
| customers.
|
| If you know them well and their usage patterns, you can predict
| with confidence how much each customer will cost you. With
| granularity to the level of a feature or even a particular
| action.
|
| This allows for extremely precise and safe unit economics
| planning. I couldn't be happier with this benefit from
| serverless.
|
| In a server-based infra you have many fixed costs: servers
| themselves, unused capacity, and your time to maintain it,
| which is certainly expensive, since it competes with attention
| to the product or maybe sales and customer support.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| Kubernetes on DigitalOcean scales pretty well.. fixed monthly
| cost. If I run out of capacity I just add an extra node or
| switch to more powerful nodes. Kubernetes takes care of
| provisioning the nodes.
|
| Google APIs OTOH... I went from $0/month to $450 the next
| because of their stupid per-unit pricing and hidden API
| calls.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If your server administrator doubles as your sales person
| maybe but for most companies these are different roles and
| you need someone to manage your fly.io account/docker image
| or your aws account. Sales, customer support, legal,
| marketing should be affected. If you are a one man show
| that's a different conversation.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Every other edge focused thing out there I 'm aware of are
| "serverless" which these days basically means they charge per
| request._
|
| Workers Unbound is $1 for ~6.6M requests (+ runtime at
| $0.0000015 per sec / $12.5 for 1M GB-sec). That's super cheap
| considering free egress, which brings me to...
|
| > _Fly just gives us compute at the edge for a predictable
| price per unit of actual compute resources as opposed to
| requests..._
|
| Fly.io may not meter requests anymore, but they continue to
| meter egress, even between your VMs in the same region [0].
| Usage-based price model is everywhere, like it or not.
|
| [0] https://community.fly.io/t/do-traffic-over-6pn-within-the-
| sa...
| mrkurt wrote:
| We don't bill for internal Postgres bandwidth anymore.
| Bandwidth in general is a good point though. No one
| _actually_ offers unlimited bandwidth. We haven't figured out
| how to be transparent about bandwidth costs AND check that
| box for people yet, though.
| gfd wrote:
| > No one _actually_ offers unlimited bandwidth.
|
| Isn't cloudflare's whole shtick about not having egress
| fees? https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-now-even-more-
| unbound/
| mrkurt wrote:
| Cloud Flare's model is to give you "unlimited" bandwidth
| with restrictions on how you can use it. If you do any
| kind of volume you quickly get a call from a sales person
| who wants to sell you enterprise. And then you end up
| paying a relatively high per-GB price as one big
| enterprise contract.
|
| They're reasonably transparent about this, and I think
| it's fair. It's just not how I prefer to buy services.
|
| At no point will we call you up and try to get you to
| spend more money to keep doing what you're already doing.
| bradgessler wrote:
| Fly is great.
|
| They've got Chris McCord there, who has already improved their
| Elixir deployment story. I tweeted a few weeks ago about
| improving the default Rails deployment experience to not require
| DB provisioning and configuration of env vars like
| SECRET_BASE_KEY and they said it would likely ship within the
| next 3 months.
|
| My hot take is they're setting themselves up to ride the server-
| side rendered HTML renaissance we are experiencing with LiveView
| and Hotwire. It will become much more important to deploy
| applications geographically closer to customers to lower latency,
| which Fly makes sane for the rest of us.
| atonse wrote:
| We're betting the same, and Fly.io doesn't know it yet, but
| part of our solution will eventually be made possible (much
| easier) thanks to their architecture. :)
|
| But we aren't yet ready for that piece.
| gingerlime wrote:
| What kind of Rails apps run without a DB? or how can you scale
| your app with a DB across 10+ regions?
|
| Would love to understand better how to deploy Rails with fly
| and still benefit from multi-region/failover/scaling
|
| p.s. horrible nitpick, but I think it's SECRET_KEY_BASE :)
| mrkurt wrote:
| Read heavy Rails apps work great multi region:
| https://fly.io/blog/run-ordinary-rails-apps-globally/
|
| We have a Gem to make it almost transparent:
| https://github.com/superfly/fly-ruby
| gingerlime wrote:
| It's an interesting idea to assume GETs will do no writes,
| as opposed to POST/PUT/DELETE and route them via
| middleware, but as an app developer, you need to be very
| mindful of any updates I suppose... replication delay can
| also create some weird scenarios I imagine...
| mrkurt wrote:
| That's all solved. We catch readonly errors from Postgres
| and issue the replay. Preemptively sending a POST to the
| primary region is an optimization, it works fine without
| doing that!
|
| Replication lag is handled too in the Ruby library we pin
| requests to the for a few seconds. In our Elixir library,
| we actually monitor the read replica directly and reroute
| writes until it's caught up.
| gingerlime wrote:
| I understand roughly what the gem does, but you still
| need to be aware of it with your app. For example, if
| every request updates some activity stat, or the last
| page the user was on (which happens with some apps), you
| instantly lose pretty much all the benefits, right?
|
| What about redis / sidekiq btw? :)
| mrkurt wrote:
| Ah I see what you're saying! You're basically describing
| our experience trying to run Discourse. Weirdly, naive,
| less complicated Rails apps work better multi-region on
| Fly than mature grownup Rails apps.
|
| We use sidekiq + Fly in a single region with the primary
| database, and then write to the Redis from other regions
| asynchronously. It's a good time in Ruby world, I think
| Ruby 3 will simplify a lot of the weird background work
| people do.
|
| Ruby 3 will definitely help us solve the problem of gets
| that do writes for stats or history, since those things
| can be done async. You can do a little of it now just by
| spawning a thread and writing the the writable Postgres
| in the background.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| oh shiet. that explains so much when it comes to their elixir
| support.
|
| Fly.io was still very beta when My startup was launching. if we
| were creating out deployment now, fly.io would be top of my
| list.
| keewee7 wrote:
| What are the physical security implications of using Fly.io and
| other edge computing services?
|
| Is some shady ISP colocation as safe as highly secured AWS and
| Azure data centers?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Fly isn't really edge in the sense that they are colocating
| with lots of ISPs like Netflix might for video at the edge.
|
| Fly is edge in the sense they have hosts in N regions and
| manage the anycast for you so traffic seamlessly routes to
| those regions. They don't publish which data centers they
| operate in only the regions
| (https://fly.io/docs/reference/regions/) but most of those
| regions line up with equinix data centers which are all
| physically secured professional facilities.
|
| It's a great question though and one they should have a
| document about.
| tptacek wrote:
| We should do better documenting security across the board,
| but I keep getting drawn into i.e. months-long DNS
| optimization problems. This'll get done this year, though.
| mrkurt wrote:
| shhh!
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Does Fly.io have a background tasks and cron billed per cpu-
| seconds?
| hstaab wrote:
| Recently, I gave Fly an honest go for a new multi-container
| project that seemed like a good fit. After digging in, I found
| that the pg clusters had some sort of system wide bug and
| couldn't be attached to any of my apps.
|
| It was a bummer. Everything seemed great, I just literally
| couldn't use it.
|
| I'd love to hear others experiences with the PG features. I could
| see it replacing Digital ocean for my use cases (if it works
| reliably)
| mrkurt wrote:
| I'm sad this bug burned you. We had some brittle infrastructure
| for talking into a Postgres cluster, and it was a bit of a fire
| drill to rip it out and simplify. You would have a better
| experience if you tried today!
|
| We know this because we have metrics on how many people created
| and then destroyed Postgres DBs without successfully connecting
| an app to them. When we show this to investors we'll explain
| that the improvement was a big win for our "go to market
| efforts". But you should know it was really just a bug fix for
| something we disappointed you with.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| "How we go to market with a cloud"
|
| <Picture of a large desk fan>
| thejosh wrote:
| Great, because I also saw this, otherwise fly is great.
| ontoillogical wrote:
| > When we show this to investors we'll explain that the
| improvement was a big win for our "go to market efforts". But
| you should know it was really just a bug fix for something we
| disappointed you with.
|
| That made me chuckle :)
|
| I encountered some of those same postgres issues and so far
| have been only running a staging database on Fly. This
| comment is motivation for me to finish moving my real DB over
| from google.
|
| P.S. I was running my own fork of your postgres container so
| I could include postgis, and this probably made management
| even more brittle -- I'm really happy to see
| https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-
| ha/pull/44#issuecomment... landed!
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Tangentially related: I really dig this "soft" serif font that
| seems to be making the rounds (including on fly.io). I can't
| figure out if I like it because it is making the rounds, or if
| it's just easy on the eyes. Either way, I dig it.
| tyingq wrote:
| The one on the titles? It's P22 Mackinac Bold:
| https://www.p22.com/family-Mackinac
| rosszurowski wrote:
| You might find this overview of Windsor [1] interesting then.
| It was a classic typeface that many others (including Mackinac,
| used on Fly.io) were inspired by.
|
| [1]: https://fontreviewjournal.com/windsor/
| theomega wrote:
| I tried to deploy an application I currently have running on
| Digital Ocean App Platform (their Heroku competitor) also on
| fly.io. The app is using Python/Django and Postgres, ideal to
| test.
|
| I must say the deployment experience was great, stuff just
| worked, brilliant.
|
| One question in case someone tried that: How can you customize
| the postgres config? I want to enable pg_stat_statements, and one
| needs to add `shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements'` to
| the config for this. One could also make this the default maybe?
| It is the default on most cloud providers (AWS RDS, Digital
| Ocean).
| iudqnolq wrote:
| (Random person, don't actually know)
|
| Check this out:
|
| > Fly Postgres clusters are just regular Fly applications. If
| you need to customize Postgres in any way, you may fork this
| repo and deploy using normal Fly deployment procedures. You
| won't be able to use fly postgres commands with custom
| clusters. But it's a great way to experiment and potentially
| contribute back useful features!
|
| https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha
| sneak wrote:
| > _Even for our free services, we require a credit card number.
| We know that 's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not
| because we plan to charge you._
|
| > _But here 's what happens if you give people freemium full
| access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining
| for cryptocurrencies._
|
| You could also permit people to make a cryptocurrency bond
| deposit to get a free account, which is forfeit if their account
| gets terminated by you for abuse. Payment cards are strongly
| linked to government ID in the USA, sadly, which means that
| presently someone has to effectively dox themselves to you to get
| a free account.
|
| PS: Please increase the contrast of your body copy. Light grey on
| white is hard to read even with good eyesight.
| gkop wrote:
| Your suggestion would make you a target for folks trying to
| launder purloined cryptocurrency.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| cryptocurrency and any free tier compute makes you are target
| for mslfeasance. cryptocurrencies are basically cancer to
| compute resources
| sneak wrote:
| If you price the bond correctly, it could even be
| profitable.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| The jumps in prices for Postgres seem pretty high. The next step
| up from $7 is $28(4x). After that it's $154(5.5x), and the next
| step up from that is $1266(8x).
|
| If I outgrow the $154 plan I have to jump to a ~$1300 plan.
|
| Is this right?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Not quite, but pricing is a little complicated AND we haven't
| shipped multi-shared CPU VMs yet.
|
| Postgres prices are a function of the underlying resources.
| There are a bunch of steps between $7 and $28, you can put any
| size volume you want on your Postgres cluster and run 512MB or
| 1GB of RAM. 1GB RAM + 10GB volumes would be $14.40, for
| example.
|
| Dedicated CPU VM types are much more powerful than the shared
| CPU. So the jump from $27 to $154 gets you, like, 20x the CPU
| power. I would like to have shared-cpu-2x, 4x, and 8x to give
| us a better cost gradient. So far it hasn't been an issue,
| though, people seem to want the extra CPU for a beefier DB.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| Thanks for clearing that up
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| This is huge! Kudos to the team for their commitment.
|
| But, is there a reason why the minimum size of a storage that can
| be provisioned is 1GB? Last I checked, a provisioned storage
| cannot be shared by multiple apps, so I had to always create an
| overprovisioned storage when creating a small app, leading to a
| waste of money. Is it possible to share a PostgreSQL instance
| instead?
| mrkurt wrote:
| You can run multiple DBs in a single postgres instance. "fly pg
| attach" creates a DB and user for each app you run.
| breakingcups wrote:
| This reminds me of the days where every popular PHP+MySQL
| application had an option for a table prefix, so multiple
| applications could live in the one databse provided by your
| classic hosting provider.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It would be nice if there was some kind of "snowflake"
| alternative to credit card. I'm not sure what it would be, but
| not everyone has one.
| mrkurt wrote:
| We're working on this. I don't like the credit card barrier. It
| adds friction to a thing we want a _lot_ of people to try out.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Thanks! Glad to hear it.
| yewenjie wrote:
| I think your pricing page does not reflect this change yet?
|
| https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| For comparison, note also that ElephantSQL offers 20MB databases
| on their free tier with 5 concurrent connections. They charge
| about $20/mo for the tier that Fly is offering here for free.
|
| https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html
| password4321 wrote:
| https://supabase.com/pricing - 500MB, 2GB download/month (can
| be used as plain PostgreSQL)
|
| https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing - 5GB, 250M "request
| units"/month (distributed, PostgreSQL-ish
| https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/postgresql-
| compati...)
|
| I was not aware of the other portions of the free compute tier
| from Fly.io, was looking into Oracle Cloud. ( _Ask HN: What
| cool stuff do you run free-tier? Sep 2021_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28652736)
| mrkurt wrote:
| It's worth noting that our 3GB free is a quirk of our
| infrastructure.
|
| We want people to try a read replica. We only provision
| volumes down to 1GB. 3GB sounds better than 2GB.
|
| Sometime soon we'll cross the threshold of relevance and
| you'll just use Supabase or Cockroach on Fly. They're great
| f'n products.
| PudgePacket wrote:
| kind of giddy thinking about multi-region supabase handled
| by fly, sky is the limit
| Kalanos wrote:
| db is just 1 commoditized piece of a platform
| davnicwil wrote:
| Really enjoying watching Fly develop. Not sure if I have read the
| strategy right, but my read is that they are going for an edge
| 'OS' which is compatible with the way software is already built
| for the centralised deployment model, where other players are
| going with a strategy of inventing a new 'OS' and saying, pretty
| much, 'all this edge goodness is available, _but_ you have to
| rewrite your software to run on our OS first '.
|
| I'm so glad to be seeing someone do this, because for a while it
| was looking like nobody would - and as long as nobody is doing
| it, nobody would have to.
|
| Now with Fly increasing in popularity, you have to expect that
| others, Cloudflare in particular, must be seriously looking at
| integrating more 'centralised deployment' tools like postgres
| into their edge platform too (if, to be fair, they didn't already
| have this on their roadmap), providing more options and
| competition.
| samwillis wrote:
| To the Fly.io team here, other than the "daily storage-based
| snapshots of each of your provisioned volumes"[0], is there a
| plan to offer something similar to Heroku WAL based restore
| system [1] where you can (from the control panel) restore a db to
| a moment in time?
|
| Also do you have any plans for a managed upgrading/patching of
| Postgres, again similar to Heroku?
|
| For me personally the fully managed nature of Postgress on Heroku
| is brilliant and what I would love to see on Fly.io. It seems
| that on Fly its a little more hands on or am I missing something?
|
| 0: https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/multi-region-
| databases/#...
|
| 1: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-
| data-s...
| mrkurt wrote:
| It's definitely more hands on.
|
| We will be able to do a WAL backup / point in time restore
| feature when we ship object storage.
|
| Managed upgrades are almost in. If you run `fly image show`
| it'll tell you if you need one, then `fly image update` will
| upgrade your Postgres. We don't do this automatically yet. It
| won't be difficult though.
| samwillis wrote:
| > We will be able to do a WAL backup / point in time restore
| feature when we ship object storage
|
| Brilliant! I have only had to use it once on Heroku, but that
| one time has me convinced that I couldn't live without it.
| powerlogic31 wrote:
| I'm a newbie in deploying and would love to see a documentation
| on how to deploy a spring boot using flyctl. Most docs are about
| node and ruby.
|
| Thanks for the free services.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Hey, just letting you know that almost all your comments are
| shadowbanned, in error it seems. You can use the contact link
| at the bottom of this page to contact HN staff to sort it out.
| mrkurt wrote:
| I would start here, if you can get it running in Docker it's
| very easy to run on Fly: https://spring.io/guides/gs/spring-
| boot-docker/
| shroompasta wrote:
| I'm having trouble understanding the purpose of these edge
| services.
|
| Granted, I've only handled small - medium sized infrastructures,
| and never really experienced the issues at scale, but if I were
| to get to that point, wouldn't it be easier to just hire a
| Infrastructure Engineer who could deal with the replication /
| sharding, not to mention having that engineer also deal with site
| reliability and dev ops?
|
| If a user wants to hit my service, and then that service has to
| hit fly.io's postgres, isn't that an increase in latency? sure I
| could probably have it pretty darn close, but 20-100ms is still
| 20-100ms. I could manage my own (or hire someone), and have the
| db live in the same container (if i have a big enough box), or
| have it within the same data center.
|
| And if it is the case that I do need to replicate across data
| centers, at that point, I should have the financial capabilities
| to hire an infra engineer.
|
| Can anyone enlighten me why I would ever need this?
| anurag wrote:
| Hiring a (good) DevOps or infrastructure engineer is harder and
| more expensive than you might think.
|
| That said, you can go very far with stateless apps at the edge
| with regional read replicas and a single write instance that's
| half way across the globe.
| mrkurt wrote:
| A user hitting your service would hopefully be hitting your
| service on Fly.io and that would be talking to a database on
| Fly.io. :)
|
| You can replicate across datacenters on Fly.io for free. No
| infra engineer required. And very little code change required:
| https://fly.io/blog/run-ordinary-rails-apps-globally/
| o_m wrote:
| Does anyone know if they have any plans to make an EU isolated
| fly.io ran by an European company?
| grncdr wrote:
| This is my #1 wish as well. I would expect they aren't, but it
| sure would be nice.
| stapled_socks wrote:
| It seems that they allow you to pick which region(s) to deploy
| to. What are you missing at that point?
|
| Is it because you need to be able to defer responsibility to a
| legal entity of the EU?
| L0g4n wrote:
| CLOUD ACT is the problem. Even for data stored outside the
| US, authorities can demand access to data. This is why for
| example in the EU you are a customer of AWS SARL in
| Luxembourg instead of AWS Inc.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Someone give this writer a raise :D "We could tell you we want to
| prevent crypto mining because we care about the planet, and that
| would be true. We also have a capitalism nerve that hurts when
| people spend our money gambling. Your credit card number is the
| thin plastic line between us and chaos."
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| >1. Install Flyctl - you'll need it.
|
| Hmm.. not sure if I want to install something to use this.
| tptacek wrote:
| If you prefer, you can build it from source.
|
| https://github.com/superfly/flyctl
| flythrow wrote:
| tshanmu wrote:
| love this - "Your credit card number is the thin plastic line
| between us and chaos."
| jmtucu wrote:
| >We've had a free tier since we launched ten years ago (in 2020)
|
| Hmmm
| dimitrisnl wrote:
| Covid years fly faster
| toyg wrote:
| 'tis a joke.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| One genuine question from someone with no context into their
| product: does Fly lock me in by barring access to WAL
| replication? This is something Heroku does that is extremely
| annoying as you'll grow and grow with them and one day you
| realize migrating the data will be a massive hassle.
| mrkurt wrote:
| We do not! You have full administrative access to your
| postgres. You can create offsite replicas, or even fork the
| Postgres app we use and deploy over your Fly.io installed
| postgres: https://github.com/fly-apps/postgres-ha
|
| RDS preventing external streaming replicas is the most annoying
| thing ever.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You can run a bare Postgres (or any other db for that matter)
| app on fly with any settings you want. It won't be wrapped in
| their nice cli command but it will work.
| junon wrote:
| Is it encrypted on the wire? Or is that locked behind
| "enterprise" features?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Every app on Fly runs in a dedicated private network over
| wireguard. So yes!
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Is there any free tier that includes a certain amount of free
| transfer?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We include 160GB of outbound bandwidth per month:
| https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#free-allowances
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Oh that's right, I misremembered from when I was researching
| you guys last year. It's persistent volumes that aren't in
| the free tier.
|
| In any case, an extremely generous free tier.
| flowcont wrote:
| From their blog, they are offering 3GB of free persistent
| volumes: https://fly.io/blog/free-postgres/#so-we-re-
| really-giving-yo...
|
| And I have obsessively started to think about what can I
| build to try them out, this sounds awesome.
| erulabs wrote:
| As a founder, there is no company the same age as mine I am more
| jealous of than fly.io. Looking forward to moving one of our
| products over to fly as soon as time allows :)
| [deleted]
| mrkurt wrote:
| Oh goodness I love KubeSail. Before Fly.io, I really wanted to
| build a self hosted alternative to Google Photos. I think what
| you're doing is incredibly valuable.
| gscho wrote:
| Now that's a well crafted feature announcement that speaks
| directly to their demographic without a bunch of marketing bs
| involved.
| hannofcart wrote:
| Was thinking the very same thing.
|
| Very earnest.
| divan wrote:
| Guide on deploying EdgeDB on fly.io:
|
| https://www.edgedb.com/docs/guides/deployment/fly_io
| [deleted]
| melony wrote:
| Free tier of CloudFlare Pages/functions runs the app at the edge
| by default. For Fly.io, this scaling has to be manually
| configured for both the app and the DB. Are there any plans to
| offer it by default for the free tier? It is hard to evaluate the
| benefits of having the data center near the end user when it is
| not offered out of the box, especially since all the Fly.io blog
| posts talk about how great their service is for HTML-over-the-
| wire UIs like Phoenix live view and Rails Hotwire.
| mrkurt wrote:
| We'd like to automate this! We've made it nearly transparent
| for Rails apps, and almost as transparent for Phoenix apps, but
| there's a lot of work to do. Right now with Rails you:
|
| 1. Provision your DB
|
| 2. Add regions
|
| 3. Add our Ruby gem to your Rails app
|
| 4. Deploy Rails
|
| 5. Set the same regions for the Rails app
|
| And it just works. Phoenix is close but we haven't quite
| polished up the Hex library yet.
|
| I think being transparent about regions is a feature! We can
| definitely automate most of those steps away, but the region
| you're running in will never be obfuscated. CDNs are
| _notorious_ for placing content and features where it's
| cheapest for them and I think that's gross.
|
| Whether we can make it free or not is an open question.
| Ultimately there's a cost to storing a bunch of redundant data.
| We have ideas for suspending and resuming read replicas, it's
| just complicated!
|
| At the moment we're a pretty good place to deploy your full
| stack app for free. And we're a very good place to cheaply run
| a full stack app in multiple regions.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| You can squeeze a hell of a lot more perf out of general
| purpose compute that is maybe an extra 15 ms away than one-shot
| workers lacking any in-RAM persistence, or ability to do much
| more than limited local k/v lookups. The equation is totally
| different.
|
| Many workers I've seen (or written) start by reaching out over
| the Internet to another backend. There goes most of your edge
| benefit almost immediately.
| rkwasny wrote:
| On thing I'm missing, is there an object store that works well
| with fly.io?
|
| Where do you store user uploaded content?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Most people use S3, some people run Minio on Fly. Everyone
| wants us to just ship object storage so they don't have to
| think about it.
| t_christensen wrote:
| I just deployed a side-project to fly.io. I cannot really say
| anything about the multi-region capabilities since it is single-
| region so far, but I must say the domain setup and certificates
| is really smooths
| ithrow wrote:
| I already get postgres for free: apt-get install postgresql
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Sure, if you want to install it on a machine that you are
| already paying for and managing, and then operate the thing
| yourself. That's obviously a very different product than any
| [IPS]aaS.
| penjelly wrote:
| requires a credit card but costs nothing, their reasoning sounds
| alright to me
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Abuse prevention has a cost, otherwise we can't have nice
| things.
| robjan wrote:
| Better than other abuse prone services, such as Hetzner or OVH,
| which require you to take a selfie holding your national ID
| card.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| I was blind-robbed by a German company because of that. I
| paid a full year, was never given access,I "opened" a ticket
| and they answered a full week later asking me to fill 2 forms
| with lots PIID+ national ID card + Credit card, I told them
| to get lost. For being a supposedly modern, democratic
| society Germany seems very backward regarding online things,
| it is not surprised that for a economy of its size and
| influence the number of truly innovative "modern" online
| companies is rather low.
|
| BTW, if someone knows of an HONEST company that provides
| online fax US numbers (Damn you IRS) I am all ears.
| password4321 wrote:
| Was it PamFax? I used them for my one-time personal use
| over 10 years ago...
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| Yes, see what they wrote after fully charging me and
| refusing a charge back:
|
| > There are some security issues with your account. We
| need to verify the > account holder in order to unlock
| your account again. > Please send us a scanned photo ID
| of the account holder and also a Letter of > authority
| (LOA). It is required that the entered account
| information are > also shown on the proof. > We will then
| enable your PamFax account immediately.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Merchants can't just refuse a chargeback. The entire
| point of a chargeback is that it's clawing money back
| from an unwilling merchant.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| Not with a debit card without insurance.
| ericcholis wrote:
| https://fly.io/blog/free-postgres/#a-note-about-credit-cards
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Lovely! "Your credit card number is the thin plastic line
| between us and chaos".
|
| I agree I'm thinking also making people pay for stuff is
| important. It's hardly like fly.io don't have a good
| reputation, I trust them and it does seem reasonable
| requirement to help them stop people destroying their
| platform with crypto mining!
| KronisLV wrote:
| > A note about credit cards
|
| > Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We
| know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not
| because we plan to charge you.
|
| > But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access
| to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| > We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we
| care about the planet, and that would be true. We also have a
| capitalism nerve that hurts when people spend our money gambling.
| Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and
| chaos.
|
| I don't really have another alternative to offer here, but i
| appreciate the transparency and honesty of saying this,
| regardless of whether they're right or not.
|
| I wish more companies out there actually explained their
| reasoning behind decisions, instead of essentially just going
| like: "We're doing this because of undisclosed reasons, please
| accept that this is how things are going to be."
|
| Of course, in many cases you can come up with a few feasible
| reasons for why companies make many of their decisions, but being
| given first hand context for these things feels nice!
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Wouldn't they be able to detect mining? And shut down that VM?
| I think many hosters would like to have that...
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| That just turns into a cat and mouse game.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Sure ... look for high CPU then anonymous miners cap their
| CPU usage. And a few legitimate users (and potential
| customers) get locked for reasons they don't understand.
|
| Repeat with every other trick you use to detect abuse.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Potentialy, but it's much easier if they never have to look
| for VM's mining at all.
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| It's not just miners, you also have people using your free or
| even cheap tiers for DDOS/PortScan/SSH Bruteforce. These ones
| burn your IP address so it's better to prevent it than to try
| to catch it later. A credit card check goes a long way as a
| barrier to entry.
| skinkestek wrote:
| As long as it is free miners will keep trying to get around
| it by for instance running tons of different free accounts
| each with a obfuscated mining system.
|
| Even if you catch all just having them try will be a huge
| waste of resources.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| The alternative is spending limits on the account, including
| being able to set it to $0 to essentially make it a "free tier"
| account.
| ewuhic wrote:
| Just for the Fly.io team's notice, the monospaced text (the "cli
| commands") renders badly when one is using the Dark Reader
| browser extension.
| keewee7 wrote:
| What are the security implications of edge computing?
|
| Is our business data as safe in some shitty ISP colocation as it
| is in highly secured AWS and Azure data centers?
| tptacek wrote:
| AWS has some of the most secure data centers on the planet, so
| I'd hesitate to draw comparisons, but we're mostly at Equinix,
| which is no slouch on physical security.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Very cool, I've always recommended Heroku's free postgres to
| people looking for a good hosted db to start with for small
| projects - nice to have competition in this space. A flat 3gb is
| _very generous_ compared to 1gb /10k rows that Heroku offers.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we
| care about the planet, and that would be true. We also have a
| capitalism nerve that hurts when people spend our money gambling.
| Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and
| chaos._
|
| Could a payments platform like Stripe build a one-click "Freemium
| powered by Stripe" button ala OpenID, so that these services may
| free-tier in a friction-free way?
| benatkin wrote:
| > We also have a capitalism nerve
|
| This article is about providing IaaS for free, and isn't that
| anti-competitive? The big cloud providers and Heroku do it, and
| I think it makes it a bit harder for OVH, vultr, hetzner and
| others who don't provide freebies like this.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think we lose much sleep thinking about how hard
| we're making things for OVH, which booked over 600MM $EU last
| year. But we're flattered that you'd think that. :)
| tptacek wrote:
| The real problem here is just abuse, and Stripe has abuse
| detection products. We have a lot of 2022 goals, but any list
| we've made in the last quarter would have included "get rid of
| the credit card prompt" in the top 3. So, yeah, _something 's_
| going to happen here. We _hate_ the fucking credit card prompt.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| Other than Heroku, there is no app deployment platform with
| databases right ?
|
| Even vercel doesn't have a database layer. Fly.io again gives VM
| - not an managed app layer.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Render. Digital Ocean.
| detaro wrote:
| the large cloud providers also have their own variants.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Other than Heroku, there is no app deployment platform with
| databases right ?
|
| Are we not counting the major public clouds as "app deployment
| platforms" now?
| sandGorgon wrote:
| so when i say app deployment platforms, maybe im not wording
| it right . like vercel. you dont worry about deployment - u
| just push nextjs code. that kinda thing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| While it may not be Nextjs in particular, push to deploy
| app solutions of various kinds are prominent among the
| offerings of public clouds.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I had not heard of fly.io but i really appreciate free for side
| projects! I have a docker setup for .NET core psql app on digital
| ocean so will be fun to see if i can get a that working with you.
| Also pricing at a quick glance seems good. Are you running your
| own servers or using another cloud as the basis?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We run our own servers. It took a lot of work but it's really
| making life easier now. I'm not sure we could offer a free tier
| like this on top of another cloud.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Curious as to the motivation for this. I've never heard of this
| company, but the pricing page says the cheapest PG cluster is
| $6.88 per month. Is that enough to keep their target customers
| from using their service?
| mrkurt wrote:
| It's an attempt to reduce friction. Developers try services
| like ours out for fun before they use them in anger. Putting a
| price on the fun stuff keeps people from trying it. It's not
| that $6.88/mo is too much, it's that >$0/mo is too much for
| developers who are used to their side projects being subsidized
| by monopolies or VCs.
|
| People spend a _lot_ of money on infrastructure when they use
| it in anger. Free apps cost us ~$0.50 /mo. If we can sift
| through 1,000 free users and find one who converts to $25k per
| month, we're delighted.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Hey, talking about friction.. in your pricing page you say
| https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#managed-ssl-certificates
|
| > Managed SSL certificates
|
| > We use Lets Encrypt to issue certificates, and donate half
| of our SSL fees to them at the end of each calendar year.
|
| > Single hostname certificates > Free for the first 10 >
| $0.10/mo for additional certificates
|
| > Wildcard certificates: $2/mo
|
| So, if my pet project needs a wildcard certificate from the
| get go, I go from $0/month to $2/month before writing a
| single line of code... can I at least run acme on my own to
| cut this expense, or this is prohibited?
|
| Actually, to think about it.. Let's Encrypt is free. Is
| charging for it a significant revenue stream? I would love to
| see the rationale for that, because it seems to me that this
| hits small customers disproportionately.
| mrkurt wrote:
| The infrastructure to manage and distribute certificates is
| pretty complicated, and doing support for certificate
| issues is expensive. This is why we bill for them. More
| details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22624262
|
| For people who need a whole bunch of certificates, the
| price hasn't been an issue.
|
| The problem with services that are free at any scale is
| that there's never an incentive to make them any good. Most
| of our certificate infrastructure improvements have been
| done because people who were trying to give us money were
| having a hard time of it.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| > If we can sift through 1,000 free users and find one who
| converts to $25k per month, we're delighted.
|
| Does this ever happen? I was contacted by a F500 who needed
| some custom version of my open source project
| (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). 25k sounds
| unreal but hey I have no experience in purchasing enterprise
| grade software and it's not simple to find actual figures so
| I was aiming at making an offer at 2.4k/month. Is it a rock
| bottom figure in enterprise grade software?
| mrkurt wrote:
| Ok this is a good and difficult question.
|
| For _our particular service_ this happens, but that's
| partially because the service is designed to scale to very
| large customers and the market has set a price for cloud
| computing resources. Companies already spend money on
| infrastructure, we're not having to convince them to do
| that from scratch. We do have to convince them to point
| that firehose our direction.
|
| What you're doing is more difficult. In general, big
| companies will spend $10k per month as easily as they'll
| spend $2.4k per month. It's equally difficult to convince
| them to do either.
|
| Does filestash get used by multiple people in an
| organization? If I were trying to price this, I'd invent a
| "per user" price and target $500/mo for small organizations
| (like $50/user). Enterprises don't love per user prices
| that scale, so it gives you a story for "we'll give you
| unlimited users for $10k per month".
|
| I am more than happy to talk more about this if you want to
| send me an email, but I'm mostly guessing about OSS
| licensing. I haven't done the work for real.
| js4ever wrote:
| How is it possible that free apps cost you $0.50/mo, the ipv4
| alone worth more than that
| [deleted]
| kulor wrote:
| What a wonderfully human-centered piece of copywriting! Kudos
| Kurt & Chris
| aceelric wrote:
| I've been using Fly for my new startup that offers notifications
| as a service [1], and the whole setup is super easy and
| efficient.
|
| Since fly deploys at the edge closer to the users, our response
| times for notifications are 20ms on average which is mind blowing
| since I haven't spent more than 1 hour on infrastructure setup.
|
| 1: https://usenative.com
| afandian wrote:
| What about databases? Is there a postgres-type-thing 'closer to
| users'?
| simonw wrote:
| It's worth reading the Fly piece on designing for
| geographically replicated PostgreSQL, it's absolutely
| brilliant: https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/multi-region-
| databases/
| aceelric wrote:
| I second this
| jamiegreen wrote:
| Not sure if this is a dumb question but is this basically the
| same as Heroku? What's the difference?
| mrkurt wrote:
| We're different, but only because we were builtin 2020 instead
| of 2008. Notably:
|
| 1. You get your own Postgres proces and disk, no shared
| database instances 2. Private networking is baked in. Your app
| talks to postgres over an encrypted private network 3. You can
| provision persistent disks and run basically anything you want
| 4. We support arbitrary TCP and UDP services, not just HTTP.
|
| We're also substantially cheaper.
| jamiegreen wrote:
| That's awesome. Thanks for the reply. :)
| radiKal07 wrote:
| This article is such a breath of fresh air. No marketing
| bullshit, no lies, straight to the point, honest, with a small
| touch of fun.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| How to get free postgres for small projects:
| sudo apt-get install postgres
|
| AND you actually get _sole_ control of all the data, all without
| the need for a credit card!
|
| Seriously though, who is this for? Any backend hosting platform
| offers a database. It's just a standard at this point. For people
| hosting static gihub pages (and storing all the database
| connection credentials in frontend js?!), don't make me laugh. Or
| you've already got your own vm? Then literally just install
| postgres right there.
| mrkurt wrote:
| This is for people who want to run a fullstack app and expand
| it to multiple regions.
|
| "fly launch" on a Phoenix app, for example, gets your entire
| app + DB deployed in about 60s for free.
| toyg wrote:
| _> who is this for?_
|
| It brings them, more or less, to feature-parity with Heroku. If
| you cared about the differentiators for Fly (which, at a
| glance, seem to be better support for global reach and Docker,
| and less fiddling with Postgres) but were kept away by their
| lack of database on the free tier, now you probably want to
| give it a spin.
|
| If you don't care for Heroku-style deployments, because you're
| happy managing your own infra, then this is not for you.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Everything about that article, including the last paragraph,
| makes me want to try this thing.
| tylerchr wrote:
| > We've had a free tier since we launched ten years ago (in
| 2020).
|
| I'm not a Fly.io customer (although more and more I am thinking I
| should be), but I eagerly read every new blog post because I'm so
| entertained by their tone. These people are clearly having fun at
| work.
| awb wrote:
| > since we launched ten years ago (in 2020).
|
| 2010?
| tptacek wrote:
| We're living Fly.io years. They hit us hard.
| jks wrote:
| I thought it was about the pandemic. It certainly feels
| like it's been ten years.
| mrkurt wrote:
| This is it.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| I assumed this was a binary joke gone wrong.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Now I wish it had been. That's hilarious.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| I think you can retroactively declare that it was
| tptacek wrote:
| This is a sort of content-free comment, but I'll say it anyways
| because it's been gnawing at me for months --- there is a _lot_
| of content queued up for us to write about; just a freaking
| avalanche of stuff we 've been working on. I keep looking for
| places to break it off and start writing about it, and the work
| keeps growing and foiling our attempts.
| chris_st wrote:
| This isn't really a content-free comment -- you've let us
| know that you all are not sitting on your hands.
|
| Have you thought of hiring a technical writer? Think of it as
| a work-stealing algorithm if that helps :-)
| kasey_junk wrote:
| If you click on the Twitter handle of one of the authors at
| the bottom of the article you'll see they list their job as
| "technical writing at fly.io".
| chris_st wrote:
| Oops... I guess I should have written "...another
| technical writer".
| manigandham wrote:
| They are hiring writers: https://fly.io/blog/fly-io-is-
| hiring-technical-writers/
| vlahmot wrote:
| I also like the frankness and simplicity of their communication
| style.
|
| No fancy buzzwords, to the point and speaks to things we all
| know are true but are typically not addressed or are wrapped up
| in spin. The first and last paragraphs are great examples.
|
| The authenticity of it leaves me with a strong sense of trust
| and respect.
| bb88 wrote:
| They know their audience and write to them.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I think you just inadvertently identified why any mention of
| "web3" makes me burp stomach acid
| Zababa wrote:
| Yeah, that's the important part for me. The "fun" part about
| the sandwich app is nice, but the part that differentiate it
| from other content is stuff like:
|
| > The free VMs themselves are just a bit of memory and some
| idling CPU, but the state is obnoxious for us to manage.
|
| > But here's what happens if you give people freemium full
| access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs
| mining for cryptocurrencies.
|
| If I had to put words on it, I would call it "transparency"
| and "treating their public as adults/with respect". I know
| that free storage is hard to find because disk space is
| harder than CPU and RAM to manage for them. I know that I
| need to put my credit card because people will abuse the free
| tiers for crypto if they don't ask for a credit card
| (sourcehut had the same problem with their free CI). I don't
| feel like they're trying to hide something from me, even if
| they still wrap it in some fun. This is the behavior I would
| expect from a good collegue.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Thank you for this!
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Though as part of the signup I'm asked for a credit card. So it's
| not really "free". It's for credit card users only that need to
| trust they won't charge you.
| danvillalon wrote:
| I believe they address this on the last sentence of the blog as
| a measure to prevent abuse on the free-tier they ask for credit
| card info, they specifically complain about cypto mining
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Thanks for that. I actually went to the blog to read it and
| you're right they do explain themselves. Thank you.
|
| I like cryptomining, so it doesn't help my adoption of them.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| OK I'm not sure why the downvotes. I don't want to enter a
| credit card to access a "free service".
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