Cloud infra, with Kurt Mackey (Fly.io) - S04E11

In this episode, we speak with Kurt Mackey, CEO of Fly.io. We discuss what it's like running physical servers in data centers around the world, why they didn't build on top of the cloud, and what the philosophy is behind the focus on pure compute, networking, and storage primitives. Kurt sheds light on the regions where Fly.io is most popular, why they’re adding GPUs, and the technology that makes it all work behind the scenes.Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).Things mentioned:Ars TechnicaY CombinatorMongoHQServerCentral (now Deft)MiamiNAPAWSThe Everything StoreVercelSimon WillisonDjango datasetChatGPTNvidiaFirecracker VMNomadPhoenixLiteFSSQLiteHacker NewsElixirDeno FreshRemixM2 MacBook Air Nvidia A100 GPU<br /> ABOUT KURT MACKEYKurt Mackey is the CEO of Fly.io, a company that deploys app servers close to your users for running full-stack applications and databases all over the world without any DevOps. He began his career as a tech writer for Ars Technica and learned about databases while building a small retail PHP app. He went to Y Combinator in 2011 where he joined a company called MongoHQ (now Compose) that hosted Mongo databases which he sold to IBM, before turning his attention to building Fly.io. Highlights: [Kurt Mackey]: The original thesis for this company was there's not really any good CDNs for developers. If you could crack that, it'd be very cool. The first thing we needed was servers in a bunch of places and a way to route traffic to them. What we wanted was AnyCast, which is kind of a part of the core internet routing technology. What it does is it offloads getting a packet to probably the closest server, to the internet backbones almost. You couldn't actually do AnyCast on top of the public cloud at that point. I think you can on top of AWS now. So we were sort of forced to figure out how to get our IPs, we were sort of forced into physical servers for that reason. For a couple of years, it felt like we got deeply unlucky because we had to do physical servers. You’d talk to investors, and they'd be like, “Why aren’t you just running on the public cloud and then saving money