Fly
Infrastructure
load balancing and edge routing
SHOW HN2017
112points
68comments
#402of 2,242 in 2017
Top 18%of 2017 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
6 positive, 11 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 12 critical, out of 29 comments about the project. Thread score -0.21.
Pricing: 1 for, 8 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 1 againstIdea: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Interesting product that makes middleware at the edge useful
From 2 comments
This is very cool. I suspect though, you'll eventually be competing with CDNs that are adding API management features. You're starting off with middleware that's smarter than a…
tyingq on HNThis lets you do smart obvious things like route /blog on your home domain to your blog provider. There's a lot of stuff you can do that makes your website better and faster…
garry on HN
Beta user finds it very cool
From 1 comment
I've been running Fly in beta for one of my apps and it's pretty damn cool. Adding a couple more today.
thomcrowe on HN
Objections
Pricing per request is far too expensive, especially at volume
From 3 comments
Wow, this is _really_ expensive! I'm sorry, but $0.05/1000 requests is really really premium. 1000 request/s is $0.05/s. 86400s/day * 30 days * $0.05 -> $129.6K/30d. 1k req/s is…
Xorlev on HNI'd still say you need to take a hard look at your pricing. Lets assume we're talking about a pretty standard Rails site on Heroku without ridiculous traffic. Lets say 1500…
Xorlev on HNThe pricing structure has similar problems at the low end. A small (2.6mm pageviews per month is tiny) SaaS would presumably have more than one request per page they want to…
pvg on HN
Routing all traffic through a for-profit company raises abuse and trust concerns
From 1 comment
I'm sure the tech is really neat, but after the last CloudFlare debacle, piping all your HTTP requests through a for profit company just seems like it's ripe for abuse. This is…
secstate on HN
SSH tunnel transport limits bulk throughput
From 1 comment
> When your visitors explore your application, their HTTPS requests arrive at the closest regional edge node, buff up with Middleware, then intelligently route to your…
otterley on HN
Requests
Volume-based pricing or tiers
From 2 comments
Some sort of slider or something like CDN's have with scaling number of requests a day and the associated pricing would help. So like 10K a day, 100K a day, 250K etc.
dubcanada on HNI'd still say you need to take a hard look at your pricing. Lets assume we're talking about a pretty standard Rails site on Heroku without ridiculous traffic. Lets say 1500…
Xorlev on HN
Add API gateway features like rate limits and caching
From 1 comment
This is very cool. I suspect though, you'll eventually be competing with CDNs that are adding API management features. You're starting off with middleware that's smarter than a…
tyingq on HN
Questions
Where are the edge locations and how is routing done
From 2 comments
I just tried this, and the IP for my test site seems to resolve to a Chicago based ISP called Secure Central Network - is that the closest one to UK? Do you have a list of edge…
marcosscriven on HNThat's an anycasted IP. We use one pool of IPs globally and let BGP select the shortest route. If you run a traceroute you'll probably find that you hit a server in Amsterdam.
mrkurt on HN
How is it implemented on Kubernetes
From 2 comments
Looks like a very interesting product. I can see how off-loading middleware can really make teams more productive. Can you go into more detail on how you are running this on k8s?…
moondev on HNWe're actually only running some of it in k8s, the edge nodes are ansible managed bare metal. We do however, work really really well with k8s apps. Our apps are all k8s…
mrkurt on HN
Alternatives named
Cloudflare
From 2 comments
I'm sure the tech is really neat, but after the last CloudFlare debacle, piping all your HTTP requests through a for profit company just seems like it's ripe for abuse. This is…
secstate on HNPretty interesting - but doing some number crunching, Fly looks to be two orders of magnitude more expensive than enterprise cloudflare. Which does offer smart routing, load…
jhgg on HN
Fastly
From 2 comments
Looking at the response headers from your own site, everything is being served up from Fastly edge servers. Why wouldn't you serve your own site from your own infrastructure? The…
andrewbarba on HNIf anyone is considering this, consider fastly and custom VCLs too.
willejs on HN
Nginx load balancers in AWS regions
From 1 comment
Wow, this is _really_ expensive! I'm sorry, but $0.05/1000 requests is really really premium. 1000 request/s is $0.05/s. 86400s/day * 30 days * $0.05 -> $129.6K/30d. 1k req/s is…
Xorlev on HN
Digital Ocean Load Balancers
From 1 comment
Digital Ocean's new Load Balancers are $20/month, WTF is this thing?
AtheistOfFail on HN