Flynn

Open source Heroku on your own servers

9 followers

Open source Heroku on your own servers

9 followers

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Cloud Computing Platforms

Launch tags:Open Source•Developer Tools•Tech

Launch Team

Render Sandboxes: a computer for every agentRun untrusted code safely. Idle sandboxes cost nothing

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Pulse Q&A

Are there any video walkthroughs on how to install and use it? I am highly interested in using this. Even though I am someone who has worked in DevOps, I find it hard to understand the docs.

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@istereotype There are four overview videos, one on each of the main pages (Home, Apps, Manage, Databases) but they are not quite tutorials. Is there anything specific that you'd like us to explain better in the docs or make videos about?

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10yr ago

Pulse Q&A

@titanous Surely, I think a video walkthrough on how to install flynn and then one on how to use it would be great. Even though i have already reached a certain point. These days video walkthroughs help a lot more. But everything aside, this looks super cool. I am sure a lot of devs like myself would highly appreciate what you guys have built. Having our own heroku itself kind of makes me feel like 😎

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10yr ago

@titanous I agree with @istereotype. :) I hope you can release some walkthrough video soon. Basic guide in installing & deploying apps.

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@menjxo @istereotype Thanks for the feedback! We'll make some more videos. In the mean time check out the four videos that are on the site now as they provide overviews of usage, installation, apps, and databases.

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10yr ago

@titanous a'right :) currently checking on it! Thanks!

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10yr ago

Hey @titanous. Thanks for your previous answer :) 2nd question. I'm running 1000+ ctn within a Swarm Cluster. I'm pushing it's limit somehow (https://github.com/docker/docker...) and I'm about to put things in production. Could Flynn works within a Cluster? Right now I don't see how as scheduling services are made via commands like `docker service create` ... Very interested to hear your vision on the clustering side of the force :) You know, what happen when you have an hardware failure for services deployed with Flynn? Cheers!

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@_pascalandy I don't think anyone has tested Flynn at that scale yet. The first limitation you'd run into would be the IPv4 /24 subnet that we use for each host would limit the number of containers per host to ~250. That being said, we're definitely going to get to the point of running tens of thousands of containers on a Flynn cluster, we just haven't had any users that have needed it yet. As far as running Flynn in Swarm Cluster goes, this would not be possible, as Flynn manages containers itself and does not run within other container runners like Docker. Flynn is automatically highly available out of the box (when you run it on three or more servers), and everything from the internal components to the databases and the apps that you deploy on top of Flynn tolerate server failures and will keep on working with minimal production impact.

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10yr ago

@titanous > As far as running Flynn in Swarm Cluster goes, this would not be possible, as Flynn manages containers itself and does not run within other container runners like Docker. Exactly what I thought. Thanks for the clarification. > The first limitation you'd run into would be the IPv4 /24 subnet that we use for each host would limit the number of containers per host to ~250. I know LOL. But check this out https://github.com/docker/docker...

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@_pascalandy The medium-term plan is to use IPv6 by default which will eliminate this issue entirely. Once we have that in place, we'll also do a bunch of scale testing to sort out where the bottlenecks are and remove them.

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10yr ago

@titanous @_pascalandy I'm curious for both of your perspectives: how does this compare to Deis Workflow (https://github.com/deis/workflow/)? I'm a fan of the scalability of Kubernetes and see this work as a Heroku-on-top-of-a-platform-I-know situation. No matter the answer, this project's presence on GitHub looks impressive.

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@mjbrender When we started in 2013, the only open source scheduler available was Mesos and the ecosystem didn't have community efforts like Kubernetes, so we had to write our own components to build Flynn. Flynn is designed to be an end-to-end solution for production deployment, and all of our components are created to work together. The whole system is self-bootstrapping and self-hosting, so installation is easy, and the same APIs are used to manage the whole platform as are used to manage apps deployed on it. In addition to the twelve-factor stateless webapps that Deis Workflow supports, Flynn also includes highly available database appliances with safe, automatic failover (currently PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB with more coming in the future). We also have a bunch of security features coming over the next few months like Let's Encrypt support and flexible user authentication with 2FA and very granular access control. If you don't need or want our database appliances and you are comfortable with Kubernetes and happy to install and operate it, then Deis Workflow is a good option. If you don't care about using Kubernetes specifically, Flynn is a good pick as it is easier to get up and running with.

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10yr ago

Rye

Cool product! How does this compare to Convox? Do you guys basically compete directly against each other? Any major differences?

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@jamiequint Convox is a great pick if you want to use AWS-specific services for your entire stack. Instead of using portable open source components, Convox uses AWS services wherever possible, and acts as a lightweight coordinator to combine them into a platform. Flynn has no external dependencies on cloud features, so you can run it anywhere, whether that's on your laptop, AWS, Google Cloud, a VM somewhere, or bare metal in a colo or private datacenter. We also include RDS-like highly available database appliances so that your whole stack is portable and you are not locked into a single hosting provider.

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10yr ago

@jamiequint does flynn support RDS, elasticache etc? If I run flynn on AWS, will it run dbs and caches on top of EC2?

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@jigardoshi Flynn doesn't have built-in integration with RDS, but you can use any external cloud services that you want, including RDS and Elasticache, from your Flynn cluster. You can also use the provider API to integrate external database services into Flynn (for example https://github.com/flynn/postgre...). The databases built-in to Flynn run on the servers in the Flynn cluster. We specifically made the choice not to consume cloud-specific APIs, our built-in database appliances do roughly the same that that RDS does, but without the lock-in.

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10yr ago

I noticed in your docs you don't recommend using MySQL in production if the app has or will have a lot of data. Do you have a time frame for full confidence in this feature?

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@karlmonson Most of our time on databases up to this point has been spent on getting the safe, automatic failover right, which we're now confident that we've solved. Our database appliances currently lack the ability to tune parameters to handle production workloads and require some optimization around the movement of data volumes to handle larger amounts of data. Implementing these features is our primary focus right now and we expect them to be ready for demanding production use cases within the next few months.

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10yr ago

@titanous @karlmonson This rocks! Everyone know how crazy it can be to optimize DB. Love your spirit!

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10yr ago

Paint the Cameras Dead

It will be nice to put the information about the license in the footer or some place visible. It says "open source" everywhere, but can't find the license?

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@bogomep Great question! The license is BSD 3-clause, and it's in the GitHub repo: https://github.com/flynn/flynn

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10yr ago

Paint the Cameras Dead

@titanous Thanks!

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10yr ago

I first saw Flynn a long time ago. 3 years maybe? Has it existed that long? Glad to see it's still going and still improving. Can't wait to try this out as an alternative to Heroku. (Heroku is amazing)

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10yr ago

Flynn

Maker

@nbrempel Indeed! We launched our crowdfunding campaign on Hacker News in July 2013, and shipped the 1.0 release almost exactly three years later, this past July.

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10yr ago

@titanous Congrats!

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10yr ago

Y Combinator

Hunter

I've been impressed with what the Flynn team has gotten done since my time with them at Y Combinator. The cloud hosting and containerization open source world has gotten a lot more complicated and powerful. What is super interesting about Flynn is that they've captured exactly what made Heroku phenomenally great and made it as simple to run on your own servers. This is a refreshing take that is now battle hardened. It's exactly what the DevOps world needs since all the complexity also makes it that much harder for people to get started and get off the ground.

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10yr ago

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