When creating a new platform for globally faster apps, one question often comes up: “But I already have an application on another platform, why should I use yours?” Easy enough. Fly runs your application around the globe—in datacenters that are close to your users—through an edge network which is optimized for faster TLS handling.
The next question is how can they move their application the Fly. For that we’ve created “Turboku”, a simple way to bring your Heroku apps to Fly. What we do is take your Heroku web dynos and turn them into Fly applications automatically.
That way they can be deployed to our global edge network of fast TLS nodes. Your users’ requests will automatically land at the closest datacenter in the Fly network. You’ll only have to use one IP address which works globally and handles all the routing for you - well, two if you are doing IPv6.
The TLS negotiation times will be less too in part because the DNS lookup will be quicker (with only one IP address to resolve), and in part because the TLS terminates closer to the user.
Fly even makes getting a modern ECDSA TLS certificate easy - it’s automatic for your Fly domain and just needs a DNS record change to be enabled for any custom domain.
The Tale of the Tape
To see how this works in practice, we benchmarked Heroku and Fly performance around the world, averaging results and comparing the time taken for each stage of the connection using an existing application. We also recorded the total time for the network connection, the time for the full request to be processed and, as Fly supports Redis caching, the time taken when a cache is in use.
| Heroku (ms) | Fly (ms) | Change (ms) | Change % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DNS | 25.20 | 0.00 | -25.2 | -100.00% |
| TCP Connection | 103.20 | 24.11 | -78.09 | -75.66% |
| TLS | 225.28 | 33.41 | -191.86 | -85.17% |
| TTFB | 464.07 | 469.81 | 5.74 | 1.24% |
| Network | 353.68 | 58.53 | -295.15 | -83.45% |
| Full Request | 817.75 | 528.34 | -289.41 | -35.39% |
| With Cache | 817.75 | 180.16 | -637.14 | -77.91% |
Try Turboku
Every component of the Fly platform can make your Heroku applications faster for the most important people of all. Your users. So learn to Fly today, it’s free.
If you have an Heroku app you want to make fast, you can start it up on Fly by going to fly.io/heroku or you can read our new application guide Speed up a Heroku App for a complete guide to the process - including how to connect all the good stuff up to your own custom domains.
Want to learn more about Fly? Head over to our Fly Docs for lots more, including a Hands On where you can get a free account and deploy your first app today.
Article updated 28/Feb/2020 with benchmark data and video.