Hi @losfair, sorry for any issues you’ve hit using fly machines launch! Unfortunately that subcommand puts a lot of expectations on apps and I think you’d be better off managing the machines directly with fly machine run and fly machine update. Those give you more direct access to the machine config.
For your use case, you will still need the [http_service] because it tells our proxy how to route requests which you’ll still want even with the API gateway setup. In order to support wake on request for internal requests, you’ll want to use private load balancing. With the above to configurations, you should be able to run an internal only service that is accessible only through the API gateway and can scale to zero.