Ankra vs Fly.io

Fast VMs in many regions, or a platform you own

Fly.io gives developers real virtual machines without servers to run. It turns a Docker image into Fly Machines, fast-booting microVMs that you place in one region or many, and its anycast network sends each user to the nearest copy. Small machines are cheap, and data out to North America and Europe costs $0.02 per GB.

2026 brought a change of focus. In July, Fly.io raised a $25M Series D co-led by Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital, and cited more than 37,000 customers. Co-founder Kurt Mackey handed the CEO role to former Docker CEO Scott Johnston and made Sprites, Fly.io’s computers for AI agents, the main focus. Mackey wrote that Fly Machines and the platform features “aren’t going anywhere”.

Ankra starts from your repository too, but the app runs on Kubernetes in your own cloud account or on your own servers, with the platform work around it built in.

Choose Fly.io to run containers close to users in many regions on Fly.io’s hardware; choose Ankra when the app must run on infrastructure you choose, with pipelines, add-ons, security and backups in the same product.

Where the app runs

Fly.io lists 17 regions. After its region consolidation, Madrid, Bucharest and Warsaw were among those retired, and Europe has five: Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Frankfurt and London. Managed Postgres runs in 13 of the 17, not including Stockholm or Paris. Running in several regions at once is easy on Fly.io and is where it stands out.

Ankra builds Kubernetes on Hetzner, OVHcloud, UpCloud, DigitalOcean, AWS EC2 and Proxmox VE, creates EKS, GKE, AKS, DOKS, OVHcloud MKS and UpCloud UKS, or imports a cluster you already run. You get any region your provider offers, and the servers and the bill are yours. Each cluster lives with one provider. Cluster Mesh connects separate clusters on UpCloud and Proxmox VE, but that is not the same as placing one app in many regions. Ankra’s own control plane is hosted in the EU, in Finland.

Shipping the code

On Fly.io, fly launch and fly deploy build from a Dockerfile, and the changelog shows steady work on rolling and blue-green deploys. Pull-request review apps are a GitHub Actions workflow you add to your repository.

Ankra’s Applications analyse a GitHub repository and open a setup pull request with a Dockerfile, chart and pipeline, or keep the CI you already have. Ankra Pipelines run tests, rootless builds and Semgrep, Checkov and Trivy scans inside your own cluster. A merge train on GitHub tests each pull request as the exact commit it will merge, and deploy provenance can refuse images your pipeline gate did not sign. Ankra’s pull-request previews work on GitHub for Applications, and Ankra’s docs say not to rely on them yet because of an open bug.

Databases and the platform around the app

Fly.io’s Managed Postgres includes high availability with automatic failover and automatic backups on every plan, from $38 a month plus storage. Its second version rolled out in mid-2026, with forking in beta and point-in-time restore. Beyond that, Fly.io gives you building blocks, such as Machines, volumes and private WireGuard networking, and you assemble the rest.

Ankra treats the cluster as a platform. Stacks install any Helm chart in dependency order. Managed services, including PostgreSQL 18 on CloudNativePG, run on your own cluster and are in closed beta. Backups write to an S3-compatible bucket you own, although databases run by CloudNativePG or Percona cannot be restored in place yet. The Security Center ranks vulnerabilities in running workloads by CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue and FIRST’s EPSS scores, and Cloud Cost estimates cost per namespace from list prices.

Fly.io says it is SOC 2 Type 2 audited and offers a pre-signed HIPAA BAA and GDPR DPA. Ankra’s security and compliance material is on its trust page.

AI and agents

Fly.io’s Sprites are a strong product for agent work. Each is a hardware-isolated microVM with a persistent filesystem, a 100 GB volume and checkpoints that take about a second. Compute is billed per second, and an idle Sprite costs nothing for compute. Sprite pricing is $0.0385 per CPU-hour and $0.021875 per GB-hour of memory. In October 2026 a new Fly MCP server arrived that covers the rest of Fly.io, along with agent skills.

Ankra’s AI operates the platform instead. The assistant diagnoses failures and proposes fixes, and its writes wait for a person by default. AI Insights analyses every firing alert. The MCP server gives your own agents more than 500 tools. Its writes are audited, and your MCP client decides how to confirm them.

When to choose Ankra, and when to choose Fly.io

Choose Ankra when the app must run in your own cloud account, on European providers or on your own servers, or when you want the platform around the app built in: pipelines with security gates, Helm add-ons, vulnerability ranking, cost and backups. It also fits when you want standard Kubernetes and Helm in Git that you can take to another provider.

Choose Fly.io when

• you need an app close to users in many regions at once, with anycast routing, on someone else’s hardware
• you want cheap, fast microVMs and are happy to wire CI, previews and add-ons yourself
• you are building agent sandboxes and want Sprites’ persistent VMs and checkpoints

Compare the work that remains

1. Ship the same repository. Time it from connecting the repository to a live URL.
2. Open a pull request. Note how each platform builds, scans and previews the change.
3. Restore a database. Note where backups live and who can restore them.
4. Place the data. Confirm the region and who holds the servers.
5. Compare total cost. Fly.io’s usage prices include compute and egress. With Ankra, add your provider’s server bill to Ankra’s fee per worker vCPU.

See Fly.io’s pricing and Ankra’s pricing.

Reviewed 9 November 2026 against Fly.io’s documentation and pricing. Product scope and plans can change.