March 2024 Summaries

Fly.io uses containers transformed into VMs with the help of Firecracker alchemy, running them worldwide. They extensively use WireGuard in their customer API. The company has made recent improvements to make WireGuard faster and more scalable for its users. One issue they faced was NATS not guaranteeing delivery, leading to unreliable gateways. Another problem was the accumulation of stale peer connections on the gateways, slowing down kernel operations. To solve these issues, Fly.io implemented a system where peers are only added to the kernel when clients want to connect and can be removed easily. This has led to faster connection setups and reduced state held by gateways.

Fly Kubernetes is a managed Kubernetes service by Fly.io infrastructure. It simplifies the complexity of operating the Kubernetes control plane, allowing users to focus on deploying their workloads. The service currently supports only a portion of the Kubernetes API but aims to support more features in the future. During the beta period, it is free, and after that, pricing will be $75/mo per cluster plus the cost of other resources created.

Sam Ruby developed an app called Showcase for managing ballroom dance competitions. The app started as a Ruby on Rails application with a SQLite database and ran on a single Mac Mini in his home. As the app grew, it moved to VMs in the cloud and now supports multiple events in different cities. The architecture is serverful, stateful, and shared-nothing, which means each update request is satisfied by a single node in a computer cluster. This approach has been successful for Showcase as data is not shared between events, and users are often all in the same room.