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title: "Fly.io: the Reclaimer of Heroku's Magic"
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date: 2022-05-15
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tags:
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- flyio
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- heroku
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vod:
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twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1484123245
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youtube: https://youtu.be/BAgzkKpLVt4
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---
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Heroku was catalytic to my career. It's been hard to watch the fall from grace.
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Don't get me wrong, Heroku still _works_, but it's obviously been in maintenance
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mode for years. When I worked there, there was a goal that just kind of grew in
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scope over and over without reaching an end state: the Dogwood stack.
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In Heroku each "stack" is the substrate the dynos run on. It encompasses the AWS
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runtime, the HTTP router, the logging pipeline and a bunch of the other
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infrastructure like the slug builder and the deployment infrastructure. The
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three stacks Heroku has used are named after trees: Aspen, Bamboo and Cedar.
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Every Heroku app today runs on the Cedar stack, and compared to Bamboo it was a
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generational leap in capability. Cedar was what introduced buildpacks and
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support for any language under the sun. Prior stacks railroaded you into Ruby on
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Rails (Heroku used to be a web IDE for making Rails apps). However there were
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always plans to improve with another generational leap. This ended up being
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called the "Dogwood stack", but Dogwood never totally materialized because it
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was too ambitious for Heroku to handle post-acquisition. Parts of Dogwood's
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roadmap ended up being used in the implementation of Private Spaces, but as a
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whole I don't expect Dogwood to materialize in Heroku in the way we all had
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hoped.
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However, I can confidently say that [fly.io](https://fly.io) seems like a viable
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inheritor of the mantle of responsibility that Heroku has left into the hands of
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the cloud. fly.io is a Platform-as-a-Service that hosts your applications on top
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of physical dedicated servers run all over the world instead of being a reseller
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of AWS. This allows them to get your app running in multiple regions for a lot
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less than it would cost to run it on Heroku. They also use anycasting to allow
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your app to use the same IP address globally. The internet itself will load
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balance users to the nearest instance using BGP as the load balancing
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substrate.
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<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="enby">People have been asking me what I would
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suggest using instead of Heroku. I have been unable to give a good option until
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now. If you are dissatisfied with the neglect of Heroku in the wake of the
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Salesforce acquisition, take a look at fly.io. Its free tier is super generous.
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I worked at Heroku and I am beyond satisfied with it. I'm considering using it
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for hosting some personal services that don't need something like
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NixOS.</xeblog-conv>
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Applications can be built either using [cloud native
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buildpacks](https://fly.io/docs/reference/builders/), Dockerfiles or arbitrary
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docker images that you generated with something like Nix's
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`pkgs.dockerTools.buildLayeredImage`. This gives you freedom to do whatever you
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want like the Cedar stack, but at a fraction of the cost. Its default instance
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size is likely good enough to run the blog you are reading right now and would
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be able to do that for $2 a month plus bandwidth costs (I'd probably estimate
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that to be about $3-5, depending on how many times I get on the front page of
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Hacker News).
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You can have persistent storage in the form of volumes, poke the internal DNS
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server fly.io uses for service discovery, run apps that use arbitrary TCP/UDP
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ports (even a DNS server!), connect to your internal network over WireGuard, ssh
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into your containers, and import Heroku apps into fly.io without having to
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rebuild them. This is what the Dogwood stack should have been. This represents a
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generational leap in the capabilities of what a Platform as a Service can do.
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Even more critical is that every app gets its own static IP address that you can
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use for IP based firewall rules. This is something that was straight up
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impossible in Heroku due to Heroku being a reseller of AWS, but since fly.io
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owns their own infreastructure and IP space, they can do this with ease. Your
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applications can be reached on a predictable IP and they will have outgoing
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connections with the same IP.
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<xeblog-conv name="Numa" mood="delet">This is amazingly useful when dealing with
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well-intentioned but outmoded security teams at companies you are integrating
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with that insist that you absolutely must have a static IP for a service. No
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more having to make ad-hoc SSH proxies or use some shady HTTP proxy as a
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service. You just make connections and they just work.</xeblog-conv>
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The stream VOD in the footer of this post contains my first impressions using
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fly.io to try and deploy an app written with [Deno](https://deno.land) to the
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cloud. I ended up creating a terrible CRUD app on stream using SQLite that
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worked perfectly beyond expectations. I was able to _restart the app_ and my
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SQLite database didn't get blown away. I could easily imagine myself combining
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something like [litestream](https://litestream.io) into my docker images to
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automate offsite backups of SQLite databases like this. It was magical.
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<xeblog-conv name="Mara" mood="happy">If you've never really used Heroku, for
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context each dyno has a mutable filesystem. However that filesystem gets blown
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away every time a dyno reboots. Having something that is mutable and persistent
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is mind-blowing.</xeblog-conv>
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Everything else you expect out of Heroku works like you'd expect in fly.io. The
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only things I can see missing are automated Redis hosting by the platform
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(however this seems intentional as fly.io is generic enough [to just run redis
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directly for you](https://fly.io/docs/reference/redis/)) and the marketplace.
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The marketplace being absent is super reasonable, seeing as Heroku's marketplace
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only really started existing as a result of them being the main game in town
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with all the mindshare. fly.io is a voice among a chorus, so it's understandable
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that it wouldn't have the same treatment.
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Overall, I would rate fly.io as a worthy inheritor of Heroku's mantle as the
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platform as a service that is just _magic_. It Just Works™️. There was no
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fighting it at a platform level, it just worked. Give it a try.
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<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="enby">Don't worry
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[@tqbf](https://twitter.com/tqbf), fly.io put in a good showing. I still wanna
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meet you at some conference.</xeblog-conv>
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