Thanks everyone! I’m extremely excited about what Fly unlocks for the Elixir/Phoenix community. Fly went off and built the perfect platform for Phoenix a few years ago, and we only recently just found each other. I’ll have some in depth thoughts to share about this soon, but in short – Fly provides turn-key geographic deployments that puts servers close to your users, and it networks them securely together. What this means for Elixir is all the distributed features of the platform just work on a global cluster, securely. What this means for Phoenix is all the tools you’re already using like Phoenix.PubSub, Presence, Just Work™ across the globe, and LiveView applications now run close to your users, so latency is optimized wherever you would like to best serve users. For example, the code you already write today for PubSub will just work when deployed to Atlanta, Tokyo, and Sydney. With LiveView processes literally running close to end-users, LiveView apps in the wild on Fly will provide equal and often better experiences compared to SPAs for many applications. I’m excited to help make this future the norm for Phoenix projects. The community is going to be able to build things that simply aren’t easily possible on other platforms

Yes, Fly will support the majority of my time working on Phoenix and related libraries. Outside of oss work, I’ll spend my time ensuring smooth Fly deployments for Elixir/Phoenix applications and publishing content around using Fly + Phoenix. For example, now that turn-key geo distributed deployments are “solved” at the infra level, the focus can shift to resources around building geo distributed applications, and what patterns and architecture decisions arise out of this new world.

Yay! I get to have @chrismccord as a co-worker!

Also, tomorrow the Thinking Elixir Podcast is releasing an interview with Chris about his move to Fly.io, what it means for Phoenix development and about the new Phoenix 1.6 release!

I’ve been using fly.io for my playing around (aka ‘learning’) with Elixir / Phoenix, and I’m certainly impressed with it, but for my toy (and unstressed!) apps I guess that’s a low bar.

What sets a high bar is how they make it truly painless to push distributed nodes close to users, something any Australian like me is going to be sensitive to (200+ ms pings to US hosts, more to Europe).

The fly.io blog is terrific.

Chris McCord joining them is I think very good news for the Elixir/Phoenix ecosystem.