Two obvious costs of running Internet apps for users on your own hardware: hardware and bandwidth. We buy big servers and run them in racks at network providers that charge us to route large volumes of traffic using BGP4 Anycast. You probably have...
Safari 15 shipped in September 2021 and included an obscure CSS bug that broke most LiveView applications. The LiveView client operates in two modes – connected, when it can talk to the server over websockets, and disconnected when offline. When L...
Fly.io runs apps close to users. We take Docker containers and transmute them into Firecracker micro-vms that run on our hardware in data centers from Chennai to Syndey to Dallas. The easiest way to learn more is to sign up, and you should try tha...
LiveView strips away layers of abstraction, because it solves both the client and server in a single abstraction. HTTP almost entirely falls away. No more REST. No more JSON. No GraphQL APIs, controllers, serializers, or resolvers. You just write ...
We’re working on super fun problems and are looking for more people to join us. In particular: we’re looking for full-stack developers. We expect this will be a good role for early-to-mid-level career developers. Some BackgroundFly.io’s users int...
This is not really a post about Fly.io, though I'll talk about us a little up front to set the scene. The last several weeks of my life have been about API security. I'm working on a new permissions system for Fly.io, and did a bunch of resea...
If you've used your own Rails application from another continent, you may get the feeling that physics has beaten your performance tuning efforts. Page loads feel a bit sluggish, even with all the right database indexes and fancy CDN-backed assets...
Better Business Intelligence in Elixir with Livebook
As a developer, has your manager ever come and asked a question like, "How much money are we making?" If you were a line-of-business developer at a global insurance company, you'd reach for your handy, nosebleed-expensive Business Intelligence (BI...
The Phoenix Framework is the go-to web framework for Elixir developers. A recent PR was merged that replaces the use of node, npm, and webpack with esbuild. For those new to esbuild, it is written in Go so it compiles to native code and runs reall...
100 milliseconds is the magic number. For a backend application, a sub-100ms response time is effectively instantaneous, and people love using "instant" apps. Since we're all dirty capitalists, we'd add: if people love your app, you'll make more m...
Livebook 0.2 was released. The big news here was the announcement of "Kino" (meaning "cinema"). It's a client-side focused feature that animates data changes. José Valim created a video demonstrating some of the new Livebook features. Use this lin...
This is a story about a cool hack we came up with at Fly. The hack lets you do something pretty ambitious with full-stack applications. What makes it cool is that it’s easy to get your head around, and involves just a couple moving parts, assemble...
Monitoring Elixir Apps on Fly.io With Prometheus and PromEx
Fly.io takes Docker containers and converts them into fleets of Firecracker micro-vms running in racks around the world. If you have a working Docker container, you can run it close to your users, whether they're in Singapore or Amsterdam, with ju...