It's been fascinating to watch this startup pivot to find product-market fit over the past year. First I heard from them, fly.io billed themselves as a way to avoid multiple subdomains (blog.yourcompany.com, app.yourcompany.com, etc.), and now they're doing serverless edge deployments. This actually makes me trust them more, as they seem dedicated to build something that provides value.
It's not such a huge pivot. The "one hostname" was checking for interest in this area and it worked well. Putting stuff under a single hostname seems to be something people want to do.
At its core, the previous product was a flexible, globally distributed, load balancer. We built all these middleware, features we wanted and people might also want. In the end it was untenable: supporting such a large variety of small building blocks was going to be hard. Building new middleware all the time was also becoming a pain, changes were required in multiple components for each middleware.
This new "edge app" product gives the same flexibility, but puts the power (and burden) into the developer's hands. You could build our entire previous product on this new platform.
