Regional capacity in Machines API and flyctl

Fresh Produce
,
1

We’ve just released a new feature in the Machines API and flyctl to display real-time capacity information for each region. We hope this will be useful to help troubleshoot and track capacity-related issues you might encounter while creating Machines in an overloaded region, and also help with spot-checking capacity planning for larger deployments of a large number of Machines.

To check regional capacity, you can use the new Get Regions Machines API (/v1/platform/regions), which includes a capacity field in its JSON response:

$ curl -s https://api.machines.dev/v1/platform/regions | jq -c .Regions[]
{"code":"ams","name":"Amsterdam, Netherlands","latitude":52.374344,"longitude":4.895439,"gateway_available":true,"requires_paid_plan":false,"geo_region":"europe","capacity":969}
{"code":"arn","name":"Stockholm, Sweden","latitude":59.6512,"longitude":17.9178,"gateway_available":false,"requires_paid_plan":false,"geo_region":"europe","capacity":596}
{"code":"atl","name":"Atlanta, Georgia (US)","latitude":33.6407,"longitude":-84.4277,"gateway_available":false,"requires_paid_plan":false,"geo_region":"north_america","capacity":177}
{"code":"bog","name":"Bogotá, Colombia","latitude":4.70159,"longitude":-74.1469,"gateway_available":false,"requires_paid_plan":false,"geo_region":"south_america","capacity":211}
{"code":"bom","name":"Mumbai, India","latitude":19.097403,"longitude":72.874245,"gateway_available":false,"requires_paid_plan":true,"geo_region":"asia_pacific","capacity":32}
[...]

Here, capacity is a number which represents the total additional number of a specific size of Machine (performance-1x by default) that can be launched in the given region. The API accepts a few query parameters for you to customize the response for different machine sizes and kinds (including GPUs):

$ curl -s 'https://api.machines.dev/v1/platform/regions?size=shared-cpu-1x' | jq -c '.Regions[]|[.code,.capacity]' | head -5
["ams",9563]
["arn",7153]
["atl",2731]
["bog",3377]
["bom",586]

$ curl -s 'https://api.machines.dev/v1/platform/regions?size=l40s' | jq -c '.Regions[]|[.code,.capacity]'
["ord",15]

Finally, as of today’s flyctl release (v0.3.121), the existing fly platform regions command will now call this Machines API (instead of the previous GraphQL query), and will include display capacity info in an extra column in its output (now grouped by geographical region). The column uses a red-green gradient for a quick at-a-glance view of which regions have more or less capacity than others:

image
image1514×1672 394 KB

Hope you find this feature useful! Let us know if you have any feedback.

9 Likes
2

This is interesting! I found the screenshot table intriguing on its own, actually. Some of these you guys had mentioned previously, like how small Denver is, but others I wouldn’t have guessed. E.g., the huge spare capacity in Los Angeles (particularly in comparison to San Francisco).

A few small enhancements that come to mind, that might be nice in the future, :thought_balloon:…

  • Column (or at least JSON field) for the cost multiplier, which is currently only available by parsing the pricing page’s HTML.
  • All-pairs round-trip times (RTT) might get a bit bulky for most clients, but maybe opt-in via an ?rtt=all-pairs.
  • An indicator, even a simple one, of the recent extent of host failures and failed synthetic alerts—conditions that fall short of a full notification in the existing status system, but might inform people’s decisions when they’re on the fence about latency, cost, etc.

(These are classic feeds for optimization/placement algorithms, in other industries.)

2 Likes