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Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

Is this a true cloud managed SQLite or is this like their PostgreSQL documentation where it's just a bunch of pre configured docker containers and the developer is expected to manage everything themselves? If the db goes down for an extended period of time at 3am, does fly.io have an engineer on call?

I find that fly.io has been a very disingenuous startup. They position themselves as some sort of Heroku successor and hide behind their developer content marketing while providing very low quality infrastructure. At the end of the day, fancy blog posts may win hearts and minds, but downtime cost businesses actual money.

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I think you are thinking that Fly is like a serverless platform. They aren't. They are the opposite. They are a server platform. They provide server for you and you have to manage your server yourself.

Nothing they provide is managed by them. You have to do that.

LiteFS is just a replication service for your sqlite database so you can keep your database synced across multiple nodes.

https://github.com/superfly/litefs

LiteFS Cloud which is the a service they provide just helps you backup and recover sqlite databases. You can do this yourself.

https://fly.io/docs/litefs/backup/

I go into a project folder and can run "fly launch" and then the application is alive in multiple regions around the world. Where exactly am I manging this server?

Open up the Dockerfile they generate for you.

How does a Dockerfile change things? Your application is packaged into a container. The Fly service runs any application not just web applications or build artifacts. Of course your application is going to get a complete operating system environment to run in.

I don't think the Dockerfile has anything to do with them pulling your container from their registry and running it on their server.

Fly.io does not run containers. They convert your docker image to a VM.

Ah right okay thanks. The point still stands the Dockerfile and image is used as a container for your application and does not imply a manage-it-yourself server is being used.

So a scaffolding tool?

There is no such thing as "serverless", that's just a higher than normal level of vendor lying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing

The first sentence in your link includes "in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers". =

There is NO SUCH THING as serverless. There are always servers.

Serverless doesn't mean servers don't exist, any more than calling a radio a "wireless" doesn't mean wires don't exist. It just means for the consumer, servers aren't a consideration, just as with a wireless wires aren't.

The irony is that many things that are advertised as wireless actually need wires, and things that aren't, don't.

My wireless printer needs a wire for power.

My dog doesn't need a wire for anything, but no-one talks about them being 'wireless'.

(Come to think of it, my dog is serverless too...)

> My dog doesn't need a wire for anything, but no-one talks about them being 'wireless'.

Indeed :-) But isn't this the same sort of definition you want for "serverless"? Not something relevant to consumers (e.g. "you don't manage servers") but a description of something where servers are not involved in any way?

Dear God this is a tired point. The rest of the damn paragraph of the Wikipedia article fully addresses that. Nobody who uses the term "serverless" thinks that magic fairies are replacing servers. The point is who is managing it for your application or business.

I said nearly the same thing decades ago. Smashed a few friends’ so-called “wireless” telephones and showed them all the wires. Just look out a window; what’re those long, wiry things running between the utility poles, huh?! It’s ridiculous, the level of lying.

I think it's "lying" if you mislead another person.

In those two examples: serverless and wireless phones, it's not misleading consumers.

Serverless is a way to communicate that the consumer won't need to provision and maintain servers. It is true.

Wireless phone means you can move for quite long distances while talking without any wire connecting your device to the wall. It is true.

You may argue they're "misnomers". But to call it a "lie" is quite a stretch...

> you have to manage your server yourself

Can you give an example? You mean backups, OS patches, firewall config, etc etc? Are they like Hetzner?

Author here. I think we could have set better expectations with our Postgres docs. It wasn't meant to be a managed service but rather some tooling to help streamline setting up a database and replicas. I'm sorry about the troubles you've had and that it's come off as us being disingenuous. We blog about things that we're working on and find interesting. It's not meant say that we've figured everything out but rather this is what we've tried.

As for this post, it's not managed SQLite but rather an open source project called LiteFS [1]. You can run it anywhere that runs Linux. We use it in few places in our infrastructure and found that sharing the underlying database for internal tooling was really helpful for that use case.

[1]: https://github.com/superfly/litefs

Can second this. Tried them out at our startup, came away unimpressed. Their good engineering blog is great marketing though, although this particular post is lacklustre. What about permissions, indirections, versioning or otherwise encapsulating breaking changes?

I was just setting up a new Fly account and launching a project yesterday. I will say their developer content marketing is very succesful and had me convinced they at least know what they are talking about.

Any more stories or knowledge of them being disingenous?

I wouldn't say disingenuous but uptime has been disastrous.

I'm definitely not buying anything there.

I run a free service on fly.io.

It's been ok lately (or maybe my users just stopped complaining), so maybe they got better.

But it's free.

Free can be the most expensive price of all.

If the free juice they give you in the supermarket tastes bad, will you buy it?

We assume the free version to have similar quality to the paid one. It's in the vendor interest, so that we like it and become a paid customer. If they can't convince us of their quality in the free version, how are we supposed to trust the paid one?

Their DX is good. They just have a lot of reliability/availability issues.

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