I was referring to the "HTTP request in Tokyo to find the nearest instance in Sydney" part which felt to me like a differentiating feature- no other cloud provider seems to have bidding or HTTP request level cross regional lookup or whatever.

The "decision that long predates Corrosion" is precisely the point I was trying to make - was it made too soon before understanding the ramifications and/or having a validated technical solution ready? IOW maybe the feature requiring the problem solution could have come later? (I don't know much about fly.io and its features, so apologies if some of this is unclear/wrongly assumes things.)

That's literally the premise of the service and always has been.

fwiw, I'm happily running a company and some contract work on fly literally as aws, but what if it weren't the most massively complex pile of shit you've ever seen.

I have a couple reasonably sized, understandable toml files and another 100 lines of ruby that runs long-running rake tasks as individual fly machines. The whole thing works really nicely.