COMPARISON
Aureus vs Fly.io
Fly.io is an excellent developer PaaS — fast deploys, smart routing, a great CLI experience. But it's a self-service platform on shared infrastructure. Aureus is a managed ops team running your stack on dedicated hardware. Different products for different needs.
Choose Fly.io if…
- ·You're building a side project or early prototype
- ·Your team is comfortable managing their own ops
- ·You need global anycast routing across 30+ regions
- ·You want pay-per-use billing with no monthly commitment
- ·Your app fits cleanly in a Docker container
Choose Aureus if…
- You're running production workloads that can't afford downtime
- You need dedicated hardware with no noisy-neighbour risk
- Your stack includes databases, workers, or services beyond containers
- You want an ops team to manage deployments and incidents
- You need a contractual SLA and predictable billing
Full comparison
Infrastructure
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware model | Dedicated physical server — one per customer, zero virtualisation | Shared VMs on Fly's multi-tenant hardware |
| Resource isolation | Full physical isolation — CPU, memory, NVMe dedicated to you | Shared kernel, shared hardware — noisy-neighbour risk present |
| Storage | Local NVMe SSD — sub-0.1 ms latency, no network hop | Fly Volumes — network-attached, limited regions, per-GB billed |
| Network | Private cluster network, dedicated uplink, public IP optional | Shared overlay network (6PN) — clever but no dedicated bandwidth guarantees |
Stack
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Supported workloads | Any stack, any language, any database — no restrictions | Containerised workloads only — Dockerfiles required, no bare-metal services |
| Database support | PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Elasticsearch — any | Postgres via Fly Postgres (community-supported, not fully managed); limited others |
| Kubernetes | Private Kubernetes cluster, pre-configured, managed by Aureus | No Kubernetes — proprietary orchestration (Fly Machines) |
| Custom dependencies | Kernel modules, system daemons, custom runtimes — anything | Container sandbox only — no kernel-level customisation |
Operations
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Managed DevOps | Full DevOps team handles deploys, patching, scaling, incidents | Self-service — you manage everything, Fly provides the platform |
| Deployment pipeline | Aureus engineers design and manage your CI/CD pipeline | flyctl deploy — you write the config, you manage the pipeline |
| Incident response | 24/7 on-call team — Aureus detects and responds to incidents | No managed ops — you are on-call for your own services |
| Database operations | Backups, connection pooling, migrations, failover — all managed | Manual — you manage Postgres yourself or use community tools |
Security
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Security hardening | Pre-launch security review: OWASP top 10, dep scan, secrets detection | No managed security review — you are responsible |
| TLS & certificate management | Automatic TLS provisioning and renewal for all endpoints | Automatic TLS via Let's Encrypt — well implemented |
Pricing
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat monthly fee — all infrastructure and operations included | Usage-based: compute, memory, bandwidth, volume storage, IPs all billed separately |
| Bill predictability | Fixed — no surprise bills from traffic spikes or data transfer | Variable — bills scale with usage, hard to forecast at scale |
Support
| Feature | Aureus | Fly.io |
|---|---|---|
| Support model | Dedicated team, SLA-backed response times, direct Slack channel | Community forum + GitHub issues; paid support plans available on higher tiers |
| Uptime SLA | 99.9% – 99.99% contractual SLA depending on tier | No contractual uptime SLA on standard plans |
The fundamental difference
Fly.io is a platform. You deploy to it, you configure it, you operate it. It's excellent at what it does — fast global deploys from a CLI, smart routing, a clean developer experience. If you enjoy managing infrastructure, Fly gives you a lot of leverage.
Aureus is a team. You hand us your repository and deployment context. We provision the infrastructure, design the cluster for your specific stack, handle the deploys, manage the databases, respond to incidents, and call you if something needs your attention. If you want to focus entirely on your product and have someone else own the operations layer, that's what we are.