It’s been a minute since the last Logbook. It turn’s out tracking every single change monthly gets to be a lot, so we’re going to try something a little different—an over-generalized weekly tl;dr of changes at Fly.io that you’ll hopefully find helpful for deploying or managing your Fly.io apps.
Postgres docs improvements
First up, some new documentation was created to run people through how to fail over a Postgres database.
“Getting Started” was updated to show how to setup a Postgres database and attach it to an application. There’s also docs on how to bring over your Postgres database from Heroku if you’re moving your apps over from there.
If you have ideas for improving these docs, open the “Edit on Github” link at the bottom of each page to propose changes. Expect more improvements over the next few weeks.
PSA: Fly Postgres is not fully managed Postgres
Want to know a secret that’s not a secret? Fly’s Postgres database is not a fully managed database. Fly does give you great tools to provision and upgrade Postgres instances, but if they run out of disk space and you don’t have monitoring hooked up, your customers will be telling you about it.
Read the Anatomy of a Postgres Outage.
This isn’t to single anybody out—outages happen to the best of us. I once sudo rm -rf / a production sever before containers made for easy recoveries, which is why I’m on a Frameworks team and don’t let myself near the Fly.io production servers. We just want folks to know what they’re getting into when they deploy their apps on Fly.io.
Integrating the Elastic Stack (ELK) Into a Laravel App on Fly.io
Not to be confused with Cervus canadensis, ELK is a way to process streams of data and store them in a way that can be quickly retrieved later. In this example you’ll learn how ELK can be used in a Laravel application to track user analytics and generate reports with them in a fancy pants dashboard.
Read Integrating the Elastic Stack (ELK) Into a Laravel App on Fly.io.
Shut down an idle Phoenix app
Why pay for something you’re not using? Chris McCord shows how a Phoenix app can shut itself down on Fly Machines if it hasn’t received quests for a configurable period of time.
Read Shut down an idle Phoenix app.
What’s up with Fly Apps v1 and v2?
You may have heard of Fly Machines, but did you know when you fly launch an app today, it doesn’t deploy to a Machine?
Chris F lays out the differences you can expect between the way Fly apps currently behave today, and how they’ll behave when they’re deployed to Fly Machines.
Read the Advantages/Disadvantages of Machine Apps post.
fly pg create does use Fly Machines, which you can read more about at Fly’s Postgres Docs and the Postgres on Machines post.
Colorblind friendly dashboard improvements
A little change in the Fly dashboard goes a long way!
Read the Colorblind friendly dashboard improvements post.
That’s it for this week. Happy Halloween, stay safe out there trick-or-treating, and I’ll see you next week!