There's a whole bunch of use cases people have today that don't require a database. Here's a few that I'm excited about:

  - image, video, audio processing near consumers
  - game or video chat servers running near the centroid of  people in a session
  - server side rendering of single page js apps
  - route users to regional data centers for compliance
  - graphql stitching / caching (we do this!)
  - pass through cache for s3, or just minio as a global s3 (we do this!)
  - buildkite / GitHub Action agents (we do this!)
  - tensorflow prediction / DDoS & bot detection
  - load balance between spot instances on AWS/GCP
  - TLS termination for custom domains
  - authentication proxy / api gateway (we do this!)
  - IoT stream processing near devices

CloudFlare Workers is a fantastic serverless function runtime, but we're a layer lower than that. You can actually build it on top of fly.

edit: formatting

This basically bumps the amount of behavior you can stuff into the edge by several orders of magnitude. Previously, Lambda@Edge will like, maybe validate a JWT. Now, you can put like half your app in there. It sounds like a tiny incremental change but it's big enough that it simply redefines what's even possible in a POP.

I'm interested, what is now possible with this? Is it high bandwidth VR sort of stuff?

This is not an area I'm in a lot, so I may be wrong, the cloudflare workers page GP mentioned says that you only get 10ms CPU time per request (or 50ms with the paid plan). I'm assuming lambda etc have similar limits. So presumably anything that takes longer than 10/50ms.

lambda can run up to 30m I think (idk about lambda@edge). CF Workers fail when trying to use something like node-unfluff, because the CPU time takes too long.

This seems to me, like a more controllable lambda@edge.

The containers on fly.io can go up to 8CPUs. So you can do a lot of computation for images, video etc.

They can also accept any kind of TCP traffic (and we're trialing UDP), so lots of interesting network services. This is especially interesting for people who want to do live video.

AND we have disks. So you can deploy Varnish, or nginx caches, etc. This is something we enable by hand per app.

I didn't find documentation about the disks: size, ssd/hdd, price?

Ah, I didn't make this obvious but that's a feature we're currently testing. We can enable ephemeral disks on apps, but it's not generally available. They're local SSDs, size is variable (still figuring that out). They're free right now. ;)

If you want to try them out, you can create an app and then an email to either me or support at fly.io and we'll turn them on for you.

They originally had (and seem to still have) the same JS runtime at the edge to give you a smart CDN/reverse proxy.

They just updated it from being JS only to being able to run any Docker image. Cloudflare gives you a persistent key/value store and Fly provides a non-persistent Redis cache.

You don’t have to move your entire app but there are plenty of use-cases where you can move more logic to the edge.

We’re moving the JS apps to just run on Deno containers. Deno is fabulous.

This is the most intriguing thing for me, perhaps second only to the fact that you guys are working with Rust. I have followed Deno since it was announced and it has been fascinating to watch it evolve. How much Deno code do you all have working in production right now?

Only a little. It works very well, once we port our edge js library (https://github.com/superfly/edge) to Deno we will move over some things handling hundreds of millions of requests per day.