API Tokens: A Tedious Survey

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...

By Michael Dwan

9 min Read

Fly.io Is Hiring Full-Stack Developers

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...

By Joshua Sierles

24 min Read

Run Ordinary Rails Apps Globally

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...

By Mark Ericksen

17 min Read

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...

By Mark Ericksen

3 min Read

FYI: Phoenix drops webpack and npm for esbuild

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...

By Kurt Mackey

16 min Read

Last Mile Redis

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...

By Mark Ericksen

3 min Read

FYI: Livebook 0.2 with Kino

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...

By Kurt Mackey

18 min Read

Globally Distributed Postgres

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...

By Alexander Koutmos

15 min Read

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...

By Kurt Mackey

5 min Read

Fly Is Hiring SREs

Anyways, we’re hiring for our SRE team. You can read that introduction and get a good idea of how intense our SRE challenge is. To further set the scene, two important true things about ops at Fly.io: ops is a very big deal here, and, because we’r...

By Mark Ericksen

12 min Read

Observing Elixir in Production

Elixir, Erlang, and really just the BEAM has a feature called "Observer". It's fun showing it to people new to Elixir because it's just so cool! It's a WxWidgets graphical interface that connects in realtime to a running Erlang node and lets you "...

By Mark Ericksen

16 min Read

Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

Every application has that core, most important thing that it does. It is the reason the application exists. It's that central idea that everything else is there to support. A major hurdle for new developers joining a project can be understanding ...

By Thomas Ptacek

20 min Read

Hooking Up Fly Metrics

We’ve written a bit, for a general audience, about how Fly collects and manages metrics. If you’re just sort of generally interested in metrics and observability, go read that first. Meanwhile, if you’re a Fly user, or considering becoming such a...