It makes connecting user domains to your app easy and reliable at any scale. Each Approximated user gets the own globally distributed, managed cluster of servers with its own dedicated IPv4 address. Includes (unlimited) edge rule features, DDoS protection, webhooks, and more. Make a simple API call, tell the user to point an A record at the IP, and it’s connected to your app with its own SSL certificates.
Built/building with elixir and phoenix, which has been fantastic.
We can also invert that by asking: does a student become smarter by writing their essay on their own?
I would argue that the answer to questions is no. It depends on how you define “smarter”, though. You would likely gain knowledge writing the essay yourself, but is gaining knowledge equivalent to getting smarter?
If so, you could also just read the essay afterwards and gain the same knowledge. Is _that_ smarter? You’ve now reached the same benefit for much less work.
I think fundamentally I at least partially agree with your stance. That we should think carefully before taking a seemingly easier path. Weighing what we gain and lose. Sometimes the juice is, in fact, the squeeze. But it’s far from cut and dry.
It's also entirely possible, maybe even likely, for people to get burnt out doing something they love because we don't set the natural boundaries we would with something we're strictly doing pragmatically.
I still think it's the best way to live, but the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" really is double edged.
https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of customers that want to connect their own domains.
Currently working on:
- Further improving the embeddable DNS widget (to help/automate users updating their DNS records) that launched last month
- Rolling out the new hybrid self hosted version that allows traffic and certs to only go through your servers, while getting the full benefit of the cloud version
- Tinkering with some AI ideas for improving the existing WAF features (tricky, but potentially powerful)
- Making Edge Sequences (pattern matching and rules applied at the edge) more flexible and powerful with more composable options and ways to match requests
Recently hit a milestone of over a million domains served!
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
In fact driving a 4x4 from Alaska to Argentina only cost me the same as it did to live in a city and go to work everyday ~$1200 per month for everything
Configurable warnings as webhooks would be pretty cool. Then I can automate whatever needs to happen on my side.
I already automate apps, machines, etc with the machines API and GraphQL, so my big worries in this area are:
- Woops, some bad logic deployed too many machines (sounds like this policy helps)
- Some kind of mistake or attack that just explodes bandwidth usage suddenly
https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of domains to manage.
Coming up on a million domains served, it's been a fun ride!
Infra engineering is the most important, hardest engineering practice in the company. I'm not one, and the people who want to do this are. So leave a lot of space here for me just being wrong.
I've had a bit of experience implementing IGP-style routing --- both as a "user" (a Cisco network engineer doing multi-area OSPF) and a developer (of a custom link-state IGP) --- and it left me pretty terrified of the failure modes here, which feel pretty similar to those of Raft/Paxos consensus, or of the SWIM Gossip consensus we do in our Consul replacement, Corrosion, which has its own challenges. If there are "innovation tokens", there are also "distributed consensus" tokens, and my basic take is I don't think we should spend them for such a marginal feature.
Here I am litigating an internal company discussion on HN (this is simultaneously bad, and an exercise in us just being an open book). I remind you of the initial paragraph here, which lays out plainly that the people in our company who disagree with me are smarter than me. A really good use case could end my reign of static routing reign of terror!
One can try to push Fly.io to implement dynamic routing to get persistent outbound IP addresses. This is full of foot guns and dragons.
Or one can push the other vendor to implement vpn support on their side such that their service can talk to Fly.io-hosted ones in an end-to-end secure channel so the actual services can trust that a lot more. This is the solution often suggested in Fly.io forums.
If the other vendor is sending ostensibly private traffic over the public internet and relying on a combination of “the Postgres protocol is safe and passwords are strong enough” and “oh but they really aren’t so we will limit this service to talk to only one IP address” it seems to me it’s them who should be nudged towards a more secure and versatile solution.
I built approximated.app on elixir, proxying 300k+ domains. It's a great ecosystem, I've never seen anything else handle really hard problems so well in my 15 years as a developer.
Concurrency? Trivial.
Reliability? Unbelievable. (YouTube Sasa Juric's "Soul of Elixir" talk)
Clustering/horizontal scaling? Built in, even across networks.
Web framework? Competitive with the best (I'd argue better, with liveview but YMMV).
AI/ML? Amazing support and tooling.
Embedded/IoT? Incredible support with the nerves project.
There's only 2 places where I feel it falls down a bit:
1) brittle dev tooling in ElixirLS that trips up new and experienced devs alike. Soon to get better though as competing LSPs are in the works.
2) no official release-as-binary tooling yet. Things are way better in the last few years for releases, and you're probably containerizing anyways, but I am jealous of e.g. Go's single file binaries.
I guess it depends on how you define urban (are suburbs still urban?). I think you're kind of right in that currently suburbs are terrible to live in without a car. But if there was magically a huge shift to much better public transport - would that still be the case?
It makes connecting user domains to your app easy and reliable at any scale. Each Approximated user gets the own globally distributed, managed cluster of servers with its own dedicated IPv4 address. Includes (unlimited) edge rule features, DDoS protection, webhooks, and more. Make a simple API call, tell the user to point an A record at the IP, and it’s connected to your app with its own SSL certificates.
Built/building with elixir and phoenix, which has been fantastic.