February 2020 Summaries

This week's edition of "This Week With Fly" includes tutorials on building GraphQL APIs using Fly, Firefox enabling DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default in the USA, and a new community portal for Fly users on Spectrum.chat/flyio. Additionally, Turboku, an app to speed up Heroku apps, was launched on Product Hunt. Fly's command line tool, flyctl, now supports tab completion from version 0.0.96. Users can activate this feature by running the appropriate commands for their shell (bash or zsh) and updating flyctl. For more information about Fly, check out their comprehensive documentation and Hands On section where you can get a free account and deploy your first app today.

The Hasura GraphQL engine is an open source tool that provides a GraphQL backend service, allowing easy access to data stored in PostgreSQL databases by mapping schemas and roles. It also enables querying other GraphQL services for seamless integration of various services. Deploying Hasura can be done using Docker images, and Fly.io offers an efficient way to turn it into a global GraphQL backend with some configuration steps. To learn more about deploying Hasura on Fly, check out the provided guide. For additional information on Fly, visit their documentation site.

In the latest Fly Friday video, it is demonstrated how easy it is to customize a deployed Docker image using Fly. The example uses Docker's official httpd image which serves files from its /usr/local/apache2/html directory by default. To change this content, a two-line Dockerfile is used that takes the httpd image as a base and copies local content into the specified directory. This new image can then be deployed with Fly. The video also shows how to create the necessary public_html directory and add HTML content to it. For more information on Fly, check out their comprehensive docs and Hands On section for a free account and app deployment tutorial.

Dj Walker-Morgan introduced the new -p option in Fly's toolkit, which simplifies the process of creating a Fly app by automatically setting the internal port for communication with the world. This feature is particularly useful for users who employ prebuilt Docker images on Fly and need to change the default internal port. The -p flag can be used during the initial creation of a Fly app using flyctl apps create, and it sets the internal port value in the generated fly.toml configuration file. This update is available from release 0.94 of Flyctl.

Dj Walker-Morgan has introduced a new feature in flyctl that allows users to build and deploy NodeJS, Rails, Go, and Java applications on the Fly platform with just two commands. This feature utilizes support for Cloud Native Buildpacks from the buildpacks.io project. The new Buildpack system is an evolution of existing Buildpack systems from Heroku and Cloud Foundry, designed to be used by different platforms. Currently, there are Cloud Native Buildpacks that support building Rails, NodeJS, Go, and Java applications with Ubuntu, Alpine, or distroless stacks. The new Buildpack support complements flyctl's existing support of Dockerfiles for building deployment images.

The article discusses Fly, a platform that enables faster applications by running them around the globe through an edge network optimized for quicker TLS handling. To facilitate moving existing Heroku apps to Fly, "Turboku" has been created, which automatically turns Heroku web dynos into Fly applications. This allows users' requests to be directed to the closest datacenter in the Fly network and improves TLS negotiation times by reducing DNS lookup time and terminating TLS closer to the user. The article also presents benchmark data comparing the performance of Heroku and Fly, showing significant improvements in various stages of connection with Fly.