Is setting a minimum number of machines possbile? (Auto start/stop)

Questions / Help
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1

I am trying out the new V2 machines. So far they are absolute great and start quite fast!

I see it as beneficial for many applications, that all machines are shut down when there are no connections at all. (Automatically Stop and Start App V2 Fly Machines · Fly Docs)

But still, I would like to keep always at least one machine instance running. My use case: Hosting a website that needs to load super fast (so no cold start up wanted).

Ideally I would like to have a setup like this:

  • One V2 app, one group with two - four machines in that group.
  • At least one machine always runs to handle spontaneous traffic.
  • The other machines can be auto started to handle traffic spikes.

So a fly.toml likes follows would be excellent:

[http_service]
  internal_port = 3000
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  auto_stop_start_min_machines = 1

Here are my questions:

  1. Is that already possible? I was unsure, if separate groups could help me: Scale the Number of Machines · Fly Docs
  2. If “1.” can be answered with “No”: Is there a plan to implement such a scaling config? :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance!

Best
Peter

1 Like
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Currently there is no way to set a minimum number of instances. We don’t have any immediate plans to support the feature. It’s something we’ve considered but weren’t sure there’d be demand. We’re happy to look into supporting it if there is.

3

Thanks for the info @senyo!

I personally would like to have such a feature. It would bring the autoscaling capabilities of V1 apps (Scale V1 (Nomad) Apps · Fly Docs) to V2 apps. :hugs:

“min” could be defined in the toml, and “max” would be implicitly defined by the number of machines.

Not knowing the internal architecture and potential challenges, I could imagine the following “solutions” for the “problem” based on these Docs :link::

:one: Explicitly defining a min-machines number in the fly.toml.

:two: Giving users the possibility to alter the auto stop “strategy”:

  • If there’s more than one Machine in the region:
    • the proxy determines how many Machines are over their soft_limit setting and then calculates excess capacity: excess capacity = num of machines - (num machines over soft limit + 1)
    • if excess capacity is 1 or greater, then the proxy stops one machine
  • If there’s only one Machine in the region:
    • the proxy checks if the Machine has any traffic
    • if the Machine has no traffic (a load of 0), then the proxy stops the Machine

Basically, a user would need to be able to change:

  • a) the value 1 in “if excess capacity is 1 or greater, then the proxy stops one machine”
  • b) the “one-machine-left-stop”-criterion: "no traffic/no load" | "never"

:three: Marking individual machines as “static” respectively “non-auto-stoppable”. They would not be part of the auto-stop-evaluation-logic.

Best
Peter

2 Likes
4

I’ve observed that when deploying Dockerized a static single executable in a programming language like OCaml, Rust, or Go, so far it starts in double digits of milliseconds, and the cost of cold-starting all machines in such cases is almost zero, whereas when cold-starting something like a large size Node.js application, it’s incredibly slow. This idea would be really useful in a case like this. It’s possible to keep at least one machine hot by constantly kicking the health check endpoint on a machine with the smallest shared CPU, but I’d really like to see such a great functionality implemented, because it would definitely mess up Fly’s great developer experience.

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I think this idea really makes sense :slightly_smiling_face:

6

… or a Java application, e.g. a Spring Boot backend :sweat_smile:

7

We just added support for this: Setting a minimum number of instances to keep running when using auto start/stop.

As always, happy to field any questions, comments, feedback on the post :smile:

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