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Fly — A smart, global load balancer for developers
Fly is an Application Delivery Network (ADN) that accelerates dynamic application delivery. We use a global network of servers to accept visitor traffic, run middleware on requests, then route them to backend applications. With a few clicks, your visitors will access your sites faster and more securely. Explore the untapped power of the edge!
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Replies
Garry Tan
Hunter
Kurt and Jerome are both veterans from Compose (acquired by IBM) and know a ton about running high availability systems at large scale. We’re pretty psyched about fly.io because they’re bringing a ton of smarts to a layer that is incredibly powerful: your CDN/front end proxy. We’ve been impressed by how useful it is already— it’s a Cloudflare that is actually what smart hackers and devops people want. Secure tunneling straight from app servers direct to the load balancer layer. Want to boost your SEO by having your blog on your home domain? Smart routing with fly.io lets you do that very simply.
I think this is just the start of what a smart developer-oriented CDN can do. Excited to see what Kurt and Jerome have in store.
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This is useful. It's nice that you support geolocation and speed connection. Can we build more complex middleware based on some algorithm? The price is also good.
@catapop84 Thanks for the feedback! We're currently figuring out a secure way to allow users to make their own middleware. We're also adding more flexibility to our current middleware and routing rules system.
@jeromegn @catapop84 check auth0 rules they have created a neat solution for execution nodejs code in a sandbox environment
Wow thanks for the hunt @garrytan. :D
Hi everyone else! We're first time callers but long time listeners, I have to be careful on here or my kids may not eat.
We've been working on Fly for what seems like an eternity (turns out, building a CDN from scratch is hard). This is something I've wanted to build for a very long time, and I know @jeromegn has too. Back in 2008 or so I was working on Ars Technica and continually frustrated by the limitations of the load balancer/CDN/proxy layer. There was so much a good load balancer could have been doing for me ... 10 years later it's still a problem.
When we sold Compose, we came out of it with a chance to work on whatever we wanted. We really, really like building and selling products to developers. Please hammer on us with questions / comments / criticisms and we'll make sure we respond to you. We're here all day.
One description goes like this: instead of deploying your app to 1 Heroku, deploy it to 18 mini-Herokus all over the world. You'll probably still want the Heroku or AWS site, but for around the same price (I was never charged a dime mind you, the "free trial" seems endless), you can ship a CDN as easy as `touch index.js && fly deploy`. Of course you can create environment variables and things like that, much like using Heroku or Docker. The pseudo-code boils down to this:
```js
let cache = fly.cache.get('
') // try get a cached item based on any key you like, a URL should do
if (!cache) {
const file = await fetch('')
cache = fly.cache.set('', await file.arrayBuffer())
}
return new Response(cache, { status: 200 })
```
But why stop there? Put some analytics JS in there with familiar `import` syntax. Server-side render some React. It's a Javascript environment that accepts a `Request` and returns whatever the heck you want. _Except it runs on servers all over the world, each with their own cache and resources_ (it's a good feeling when your site loads as fast in New York as in Beijing).
I refactored my React app to fix it's broken server-side rendering, so that 90% of the data was cacheable. Fly.io was the "last mile" service that made things fast worldwide without crashing my measly 4GB server.
Take this with a grain of salt, but it all ground to a halt for me. They had very few examples, so I started writing some and making libraries. They offered to pay for an article and library, but I never heard back after sending a draft. Whole regions (of the world) just didn't work for some reason. I'm still reading their source code and forking their stuff to use it under Apache license. But I hope they get a second wind.
') // try get a cached item based on any key you like, a URL should do
if (!cache) {
const file = await fetch('')
cache = fly.cache.set('', await file.arrayBuffer())
}
return new Response(cache, { status: 200 })
```
But why stop there? Put some analytics JS in there with familiar `import` syntax. Server-side render some React. It's a Javascript environment that accepts a `Request` and returns whatever the heck you want. _Except it runs on servers all over the world, each with their own cache and resources_ (it's a good feeling when your site loads as fast in New York as in Beijing).
I refactored my React app to fix it's broken server-side rendering, so that 90% of the data was cacheable. Fly.io was the "last mile" service that made things fast worldwide without crashing my measly 4GB server.
Take this with a grain of salt, but it all ground to a halt for me. They had very few examples, so I started writing some and making libraries. They offered to pay for an article and library, but I never heard back after sending a draft. Whole regions (of the world) just didn't work for some reason. I'm still reading their source code and forking their stuff to use it under Apache license. But I hope they get a second wind.