The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
You'll rent chips and be happy (Friends)
Fri, 18 Oct 2024
Zac Smith left his role leading Equinix Metal in June of 2023. Since then, he's been thinking deeply about the present and potential future of data centers, OEMs, chip makers & more.
Full Episode
Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about hydrogen non-bombs. Thanks to our partners at Fly.io. Launch your app on Fly in five minutes or less and join three million others, including us. Learn how at Fly.io.
Let's talk. Hey friends, you know we're big fans of fly.io and I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly. Kurt, we've had some conversations and I've heard you say that public clouds suck. What is your personal lens into public clouds sucking and how does Fly not suck?
All right, so public clouds suck. I actually think most ways of hosting stuff on the internet sucks. And I have a lot of theories about why this is, but it almost doesn't matter. The reality is like I've built a new app for like generating sandwich recipes because my family's just into specific types of sandwiches. They use Braunschweiger as a component, for example.
And then I want to like put that somewhere. You go to AWS and it's harder than just going and getting like a dedicated server from Hetzner. It's like it's actually like more complicated to figure out how to deploy my dumb sandwich app on top of AWS because it's not built for me as a developer to be productive with. It's built for other people.
It's built for platform teams to kind of build the infrastructure of their dreams and hopefully create a new UX that's useful for the developers that they work with. And again, I feel like every time I talk about this, it's like I'm just too impatient. I don't particularly want to go figure so many things out purely to put my sandwich app in front of people.
And I don't particularly want to have to go talk to a platform team once my sandwich app becomes a huge startup and IPOs and I have to do a deploy. I kind of feel like all that stuff should just work for me without me having to go ask permission or talk to anyone else. And so this informed a lot of how we built Fly. We're still a public cloud.
We still have a lot of very similar low-level primitives as the bigger guys. But in general, they're designed to be used directly by developers. They're not built for a platform team to kind of cobble together. They're designed to be useful quickly for developers.
One of the ways we've thought about this is if you can turn a very difficult problem into a two-hour problem, people will build much more interesting types of apps. And so this is why we've done things like made it easy to run an app multi-region. Most companies don't run multi-region apps on public clouds because it's it's functionally impossible to do without a huge amount of upfront effort.
It's why we've made things like the virtual machine primitives behind just a simple API. Most people don't do like code sandboxing or their own virtualization because it's just not really easy. There's no path to that on top of the clouds. So in general, like I feel like and it's not really fair of me to say public cloud suck because they were built for a different time.
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