Great post! I always learn something new from fly.io blog posts. I hope y'all succeeded in clearing out the hobgoblins.
As an Elixir developer, fly.io has been a tempting option because it has a lot of buy-in in the community, but counterintuitively posts like this make me question if fly.io is really for me and my relatively small and local apps. Apps with a global presence requiring low latency everywhere, as this post shows, invites a lot of technical complexity. Is fly.io mostly for the "big dogs" then? Is it still a good, affordable solution with nice developer UX if you only ever intend to deploy to a single region?
Believe it or not, pretty much every cloud that runs full stack apps has a similar proxy / service discovery layer. Even if they only let you run in one region.
If you run your app on your own servers with your own load balancers and terminate your own TLS, you avoid a lot of this infrastructure. If you use anyone with a "cloud" load balancer, you get almost exactly what we've described here.
Complexity is a legitimate reason to manage your own server. A single server with a single database and nothing between you and the users avoids a lot of complexity.
I don’t have a take on if it’s a good fit for single region hosting (though the tooling makes that tremendously simple).
I will say that I think the days of single region deployments are coming to an end, even for “the little guys”. Regulation all over the world is demanding your application be region aware and the nature of the internet means your users will come from those jurisdictions.
If anything we need simple web stacks that acknowledge this and hosts (like fly) and data tiers that enable it trivially.
As an Elixir developer, fly.io has been a tempting option because it has a lot of buy-in in the community, but counterintuitively posts like this make me question if fly.io is really for me and my relatively small and local apps. Apps with a global presence requiring low latency everywhere, as this post shows, invites a lot of technical complexity. Is fly.io mostly for the "big dogs" then? Is it still a good, affordable solution with nice developer UX if you only ever intend to deploy to a single region?