We’re constantly looking for ways to make our platform faster. This time, we migrated 10% of our fleet from SATA SSD to NVMe disks.
Fly.io maintains a global fleet of bare-metal servers, and we work with many vendors to ensure wide coverage and improve our SLAs. It’s been some time since we launched Fly Machines, and about 20% of our fleet was still running on an older generation of servers using SATA SSDs. While reliable, these drives are an order of magnitude slower than the modern NVMe drives we use in our newer machines. A typical SSD we used, with SATA 6Gb/s interface, could do 550MB/s of sequential reads. An NVMe can do 6700MB/s. Your IO heavy apps might have noticed this, and we’ve even run into slowdowns ourselves during regular host backups.
The plan in action
We started migrating customer apps off these older SATA-based servers and onto brand-new machines equipped with speedy NVMe drives. As of today, we have already moved half of them, which means only 10% of our fleet is still powered by SATA SSDs.
What this means for you?
Quite simply: faster, more responsive apps. Every time we retire an older server, the average performance and reliability of our entire fleet goes up. This will be most noticeable in the disk IO performance of apps that use it heavily.
Behind the scenes, we’re working to reduce the share of hosts running SATA SSDs to zero.