litestream VS flyctl

I have not, but I keep meaning to collate everything I've learned into a set of useful defaults just to remind myself what settings I should be enabling and why.

Regarding Litestream, I learned pretty much all I know from their documentation: https://litestream.io/

This presentation is focused on the use-case of vertically scaling a single server and driving everything through that app server, which is running SQLite embedded within your application process.

This is the sweet-spot for SQLite applications, but there have been explorations and advances to running SQLite across a network of app servers. LiteFS (https://fly.io/docs/litefs/), the sibling to Litestream for backups (https://litestream.io), is aimed at precisely this use-case. Similarly, Turso (https://turso.tech) is a new-ish managed database company for running SQLite in a more traditional client-server distribution.

This post intends to help you setup replication for SQLite using Litestream.

I've been messing around with litestream. It is so cool. And, I either found a bug in the -timestamp switch or don't understand it correctly.

What I want to do is time travel into my sqlite database. I'm trying to do some forensics on why my web service returned the wrong data during a production event. Unfortunately, after the event, someone deleted records from the database and I'm unsure what the data looked like and am having trouble recreating the production issue.

Litestream has this great switch: -timestamp. If you use it (AFAICT) you can time travel into your database and go back to the database state at that moment. However, it does not seem to work as I expect it to:

https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/564

I have the entirety of the sqlite database from the production event as well. Is there a way I could cycle through the WAL files and restore the database to the point in time before the records I need were deleted?

Will someone take sqlite and compile it into the browser using WASM so I can drag a sqlite database and WAL files into it and then using a timeline slider see all the states of the database over time? :)

We're using SQLite in production very heavily with millions of databases and fairly high operations throughput.

But we did run into some scariness around trying to use Litestream that put me off it for the time being. Litestream is really cool but it is also very much a cool hack and the risk of database corruption issues feels very real.

The scariness I ran into was related to this issue https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/510

Litestream is a library that allows you to easily create backups. You can probably just do analytic queries on the backup data and reduce load on your server.

https://litestream.io/

One possible strategy is to have one directory/file per customer which is one SQLite file. But then as the user logs in, you have to look up first what database they should be connected to.

OR somehow derive it from the user ID/username. Keeping all the customer databases in a single directory/disk and then constantly "lite streaming" to S3.

Because each user is isolated, they'll be writing to their own database. But migrations would be a pain. They will have to be rolled out to each database separately.

One upside is, you can give users the ability to take their data with them, any time. It is just a single file.

[0]. https://litestream.io/

Upstream Kuma uses a local SQLite database to store account data, configuration for services to monitor, notification settings, and more. To make sure that our data is available across redeploys, we will bundle Uptime Kuma with Litestream, a project that implements streaming replication for SQLite databases to a remote object storage provider. Effectively, this allows us to treat the local SQLite database as if it were securely stored in a remote database.

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.

You can learn more about fly.io and tigris, we will need to create an account on both platforms for this project regardless. Anyway with the theory out of the way let's get started in the next section as we create our accounts and start building the app.

Fly.io is a platform that helps you run your apps and databases closer to your users all around the world. It takes your app code, packages it up neatly, and puts it on virtual machines that can be quickly started or stopped. This makes your app faster for users and more reliable. Fly.io is easy to use, works well for small projects or personal apps. It's a great way to make sure your app runs smoothly for people no matter where they are.

In this post, we'll start from scratch, running FerretDB locally via Docker, trying out the connection with mongosh and the MongoDB Node.js client, and finally deploy FerretDB to Fly.io for a production ready set up.

2- fly.io

Fly is a cloud platform that focuses on global edge computing. Fly specializes in high-performance hosting and provides a global network of edge locations. Fly is known for its scalability and performance optimizations.

But videototextai.com is built using NextJS + Firebase auth + Firestore and a backend deployed at fly.io . Fly makes it really easy to deploy docker containers and that is IMO the fastest way to develop, you can setup a local setup

Alternatives explored: * northflank: While running the wrk test, requests were taking 3-7 seconds. Couldn't repeat Heroku's phenomenon of "400ms-800ms" during such a load test. * fly.io: Reliability: It’s Not Great * render.com: I remember the time when indiehackers.com was down because of an outage on Render, not sure if it's worth trusting.

For personal/portfolio projects fly.io and render.com both have free tiers that support the major backend frameworks and Postgres at the very least (although I think with Render at least the DB expires and has to be reloaded after a certain amount of time, have not personally tried it).