Fly Machines: Now available on VHS đź“Ľ (video tutorial)

Fresh Produce
1

OK so, first off, I can’t believe the :vhs: emoji exists. Do people even know what VHS is anymore? Remember betamax?

Secondly (“second off?”), we thought some videos showing off how to use Fly Machines would be useful.

Why?

Fly Machines are the building block of Fly.io. When you run fly launch…fly deploy, all flyctl is doing is orchestrating API calls to create Machines in fun ways. The difference between rolling and blue-green deployments are just some conditionals within flyctl (which is, btw, open source).

We like when people use Machines in fun, creative ways! Beyond the experience of running your app you have with just a few flyctl calls, Fly Machines are capable of quite a bit. I think of Machines as being like Lambda, but without the random restrictions (but also without the autoscaling features).

They can run apps, of course (24/7 or auto-stopping when idle), but they’re also great for shorter, bursty workloads. Need to spin up Machines for CI workloads? Sure! Want to run some user-code? Can do! Need to process some video files? Spin up a Machine, and watch that Machine auto-destroy itself when it’s done.

The Videos

I want to keep adding to these since there’s a lot of fun use cases along with various, creative ways to run Machines. The “devil in the details” gives a lot of fodder for future topics, so if you like video content, smash that likesc…er…keep your eyes open for more videos.

Fly Machines I: The Building Block of Fly.io

  1. What the Fly? What is Fly.io, anyway?
  2. Fly Launch - How Fly.io uses Machines as a building block
  3. Running Fly Machines via Flyctl
  4. Running Your Code on a Fly Machine
  5. Using the Remote Builder with Fly Machines - What to do when your local Docker sucks

Fly Machines II: Running User Code

  1. Automating Machines via API
  2. A real-world example: Running untrusted user code
  3. Running code securely - segmenting Fly.io apps
  4. How to structure a project to run user code
  5. The fully automated way to run user code

Let us know if you have any questions on Fly Machines or wish to inquire about the sun burn I had in the first few videos.

Be kind, rewind.

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