flyctl VS sst

Fly.io is a platform that enables developers to deploy and run their applications close to their users. It leverages a global network of servers to provide low-latency, high-performance hosting solutions. It simplifies the deployment process by offering a powerful CLI and automated workflows, making it easy to deploy applications with minimal hassle. Additionally, Fly.io supports various programming languages and frameworks, including Next.js, making it a versatile choice for modern web development.

With the Wasp CLI, you can deploy the React frontend, Node.js backend (server), and PostgreSQL database generated by the Wasp compiler to Fly.io with a single command.

This is a MVP for Serverless Postgres.

1/ It uses Fly.io[0], which can automatically pause your database after all connections are released (and start it again when new connections join).

2/ It uses Oriole[1], a Postgres extension with experimental support for S3 / Decoupled Storage[2].

3/ It uses Tigris[3], Globally Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage. Oriole will automatically backup the data to Tigris using background workers.

I wouldn't recommend using this in production, but I think it's in a good spot to provoke some discussion and ideas. You can get it running on your own machine with the steps provided - connecting to a remote Tigris bucket (can also be an AWS S3 bucket).

[0] https://fly.io

[1] https://www.orioledb.com/

[2] Oriole Experiemental s3: https://www.orioledb.com/docs/usage/decoupled-storage

[3] Tigris: https://www.tigrisdata.com/

Fly.io - Very similar to Heroku too, easy to use and support for multiple stacks/languages.

Fly.io is a cloud platform that allows developers to easily deploy scalable applications. In this article, we will introduce how to manage databases effectively in an application using Remix, Prisma, and LiteFS on Fly.io.

Deploying applications can be a complex and time-consuming process. App deployment tools, such as Fly.io, aim to simplify this process by providing a platform for easily deploying and managing applications.

To begin with, you could go with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider like Heroku, or Fly for a more seamless experience. You can also do a bit of DevOps: set up a Docker installation on a VPS and deploy your app there.

To begin visit fly.io to create an account. Next install flyctl a command line tool for creating and deploying fly apps. macOS

For frontend deployment, I used Netlify (for the generous free package) and the recommended fly.io for server + database (also cheap package).

Create an account on Fly.io.

In case it’s helpful to anyone who has to jump off vercel:

I recently had to transition my company off of vercel for reasons unrelated to this (wanted to use cloud infra primitives that vercel does not provide, and wanted to leverage the large amount of AWS credits my company received) and found that sst.dev [0] to be easy to migrate to and a joy to use in general. It leverages open-next to deploy next.js projects on AWS in a serverless way.

I’ve been enjoying using it so much that for my next project I think I’ll skip vercel altogether and use sst from the start.

[0] https://sst.dev/

We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!

> But if you have a sufficiently large enough API surface, doing one lambda per endpoint comes with a lot of pain as well. Packaging and deploying all of those artifacts can be very time consuming, especially if you have a naive approach that does a full rebuild/redeploy every time the pipeline runs.

Yeah, thankfully SST [0] does the heavy lifting for me. I've tried most of the solutions out there and SST was where I was the happiest. Right now I do 1 functions per endpoint. I structure my code like url paths mostly, 1 stack per final folder, so that the "users" folder maps to "/users/*" and inside I have get/getAll/create/update/delete files that map to GET X/id, GET X, POST X, POST X/id, DELETE/id. It works out well, it's easy to reason about, and deploys (a sizable a backend) in about 10min on GitHub Actions (which I'm going to swap out probably for something faster).

I agree with the secrets/permissions aspect and I like that it's stupid-simple for me to attach secrets/permissions at a low level if I want.

I use NodeJS and startup isn't horrible and once it's up the requests as very quick. For my needs, an the nature of the software I'm writing, lambda makes a ton of sense (mostly never used, but when it's used it's used heavily and needs to scale up high).

[0] https://sst.dev

We will start by building a project with SST that provisions an API Gateway, a Lambda, and an S3 bucket. Once implemented, we'll look into testing for concurrent write conflicts or exceeding capacity limits.

I recently deployed a node websocket server using the SST Service construct. Until this point my stack had been functions and buckets. While I had no users 😢, I also had no costs 🤡.

Most my personal and side-business projects have very spiky load or just low load in general. Because of that I love using AWS Lambda as my backend since it scales to 0 and scales to whatever you have your limits set at.

I use SST [0] for my backend with NodeJS (TypeScript) and Vue (Quasar) for my frontend. For my database I use either Postgres or DynamoDB if the fit is right (Single Table Design is really neat). For Postgres I like Neon [1] though their recent pricing changes make it less appealing.

[0] https://sst.dev

[1] https://neon.tech

Yup. Entire core business product for a succeeding startup, though it's a small team of contributors (<10), and a much smaller platform team. Serverless backend started in 2018. Been a blessing in many regards, but it has its warts (often related to how new this architecture is, and of course we've made our own mistakes along the way).

I really like the model of functions decoupled through events. Big fan of that. It's very flexible and iterative. Keep that as your focus and it's great. Be careful of duplicating config, look for ways to compose/reuse (duh, but definitely a lesson learnt) and same with CI, structure your project so it can use something off-the-shelf like serverless-compose. Definitely monorepo/monolith it, I'd be losing my mind with 100-150 repos/"microservices" with a team this size. If starting now I'd maybe look at SST framework[0] because redeploying every change during development gets old fast

I couldn't go back to any other way to be honest, for cloud-heavy backends at least. By far the most productive I've ever been

Definitely has its warts though, it's not all roses.

[0] http://sst.dev

Along the way, you find an excellent framework, SST. Which is much faster than CDK and provides a better DX1. Here is how you then define your MultiPipelineStack.

SST is a powerful framework that simplifies the development of serverless applications. It offers a straightforward and opinionated approach to defining serverless apps using TypeScript. Built on top of AWS CDK, SST handles the complexity of setting up your serverless infrastructure automatically. SST is an open-source framework and is completely free to use.