Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

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interesting, i was more pointing to the cold startup time on lambda with docker images vs this.

    Deploy App Servers
    Close to Your Users

is there a timeout limit to functions? This piques my interest but I can't tell if fly is a serverless function provider or some way to deploy my docker closest to my user (which is what I am looking for right now)

What guarantee is there in terms of average latency for my users? Is there a looking glass of sort where I can ping/see all the locations where my docker images will be running?

a dedicated 4-core 8gb ram is $124.00/month which is 4~6x more expensive than running on KVM vps so I want to know what I am signing up for

edit: I see the list of locations and it makes me think, aren't I already doing what fly.io is doing? I spin up a VPS instance at one of the locations that is closest to my user. It takes about 30~120 seconds. It's far far cheaper

https://fly.io/docs/reference/regions/

Oh I see! Fly Machines are lower level than what most people use us for. They're designed for people building platforms.

Most people run "apps" on Fly. You control which regions they run in, we load balance to the nearest. We have guides for launching some frameworks here: https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/

The difference between us and a VPS provider is: your app runs in as many of those regions as you want. So does your database, if you're using our Postgres. And we route writes to the appropriate place: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/

The other difference is probably CPU. The 4 cpu, 8GB RAM instances are 2 dedicated AMD EPYC cores + hyper threads. They're relatively expensive. You may not need them! VPS providers typically run cheaper CPUs and over provision them.

We're shipping shared CPU options with more memory soon. They should be closer to what you see from VPS providers, though still more expensive.

I see, so is it routing requests to a single instance or is it routing it to the nearest instance to the user? How will it scale if there are lot of users in a particular city?

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