5 ms·

How does this compare to Cloud Foundry?

by spamlord 10y ago

EngineerBetter 10y ago
Good question - I dare say it is nowhere near as battle-tested in production.
- EngineerBetter 10y ago
  Caveat: I run a Cloud Foundry consultancy. A quick glance shows a couple of things: * Automatic cluster scaling, so your PaaS deployment is as small as possible. Cloud Foundry doesn't have this, and I wish it did * Flynn has built-in service discovery, in Cloud Foundry you bring your own (if you want) * Flynn comes bundled with some data services * Flynn has no BOSH equivalent, so there's nothing there to bring back VMs when they fail, perform rolling upgrades or manage the IaaS * Flynn doesn't seem to offer a metrics stream, only logs * Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack * I couldn't find anything about role-based access control in Flynn, something Cloud Foundry has (which can be backed by LDAP for enterprises) * Flynn only appears to route HTTP traffic, so no TCP routing for IoT workloads * Cloud Foundry is run at massive scale in production for mission-critical workloads by banks, payment processors, IoT data ingesters, manufacturing companies, research companies, governments and everything inbetween. I can't see any evidence of the same being said for Flynn. * Flynn is owned by one company, Cloud Foundry is owned by a non-profit organisation affiliated with the Linux Foundation and can never be transferred back to a regular company. This prevents the sort of nonsense you've seen in the Docker community recently.
  - _lmars 10y ago
    > Flynn has no BOSH equivalent, so there's nothing there to bring back VMs when they fail, perform rolling upgrades or manage the IaaS Flynn auto-heals after node restarts (and if it doesn't that is first and foremost a bug we need to fix), but also has a cluster monitor service which brings services back online automatically, and as a last gasp there is `flynn-host fix` for manual intervention. Flynn has node promotion / demotion so you can totally do rolling upgrades (users have reported they do this with a modified CloudFormation stack for example). There is also a built-in updater to update to a more recent version of Flynn. > Flynn doesn't seem to offer a metrics stream, only logs Something I think should be built-in, but there are many off the shelf solutions which can be deployed to Flynn as apps. > Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack Flynn has built-in buildpacks but also supports running custom buildpacks (see https://flynn.io/docs/apps#buildpacks https://flynn.io/docs/apps#buildpacks). If you just want to deploy binaries, you can either: - use the inline buildpack: https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-inline https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-inline - deploy a tarball: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/306#issuecomment-233211243 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/306#issuecomment-23321... - deploy a Docker image: https://flynn.io/docs/docker https://flynn.io/docs/docker > I couldn't find anything about role-based access control in Flynn, something Cloud Foundry has (which can be backed by LDAP for enterprises) Flynn does not currently have strict access control, but work is very much on the way, see our security improvements project: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/projects/1 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/projects/1. > Flynn only appears to route HTTP traffic, so no TCP routing for IoT workloads Flynn supports TCP routes, although it does not seem to be documented very well: https://flynn.io/docs/cli#route https://flynn.io/docs/cli#route
    - EngineerBetter 10y ago
      Thanks for the clarifications! The Flynn auto-heal - does that monitor infrastructure (ie at the VM level) or is that process auto-healing?
      - Titanous 10y ago
        That's at the process level only currently.
  - arekkas 10y ago
    * Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack You can deploy docker images, at least that was the case one year ago * Cloud Foundry is run at massive scale in production for mission-critical workloads by banks, payment processors, IoT data ingesters, manufacturing companies, research companies, governments and everything inbetween. I can't see any evidence of the same being said for Flynn. I think that's the whole idea behind flynn. Instead of being heavy-weight, complicated to deploy (no BOSH) and resource intensive, you can run a cluster with 3 nodes and deploy a ton of services there. It's not targeted at banks, it's targeted at people who don't want to use heroku or pivotal or GCE. And this makes it a lot faster in many ways, at least last time I checked.
    - EngineerBetter 10y ago
      That's cool about Docker images. Cloud Foundry has a binary buildpack, and the Java buildpack deals with .jars, which means slightly lower complexity for the end user than needing to roll a Docker image. CF does Docker too now, which is nice for compatibility, but I think people are missing the point by deploying images instead of apps. Fair points about BOSH, it's got a steep learning curve (cliff). I'd love to see Cloud Foundry have an install experience that's along the lines of "Hey, here's some IP addresses and an SSH key. Go install yourself there."

How does this compare to Cloud Foundry?

EngineerBetter 10y ago

Good question - I dare say it is nowhere near as battle-tested in production.

EngineerBetter 10y ago
Caveat: I run a Cloud Foundry consultancy. A quick glance shows a couple of things: * Automatic cluster scaling, so your PaaS deployment is as small as possible. Cloud Foundry doesn't have this, and I wish it did * Flynn has built-in service discovery, in Cloud Foundry you bring your own (if you want) * Flynn comes bundled with some data services * Flynn has no BOSH equivalent, so there's nothing there to bring back VMs when they fail, perform rolling upgrades or manage the IaaS * Flynn doesn't seem to offer a metrics stream, only logs * Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack * I couldn't find anything about role-based access control in Flynn, something Cloud Foundry has (which can be backed by LDAP for enterprises) * Flynn only appears to route HTTP traffic, so no TCP routing for IoT workloads * Cloud Foundry is run at massive scale in production for mission-critical workloads by banks, payment processors, IoT data ingesters, manufacturing companies, research companies, governments and everything inbetween. I can't see any evidence of the same being said for Flynn. * Flynn is owned by one company, Cloud Foundry is owned by a non-profit organisation affiliated with the Linux Foundation and can never be transferred back to a regular company. This prevents the sort of nonsense you've seen in the Docker community recently.
- _lmars 10y ago
  > Flynn has no BOSH equivalent, so there's nothing there to bring back VMs when they fail, perform rolling upgrades or manage the IaaS Flynn auto-heals after node restarts (and if it doesn't that is first and foremost a bug we need to fix), but also has a cluster monitor service which brings services back online automatically, and as a last gasp there is `flynn-host fix` for manual intervention. Flynn has node promotion / demotion so you can totally do rolling upgrades (users have reported they do this with a modified CloudFormation stack for example). There is also a built-in updater to update to a more recent version of Flynn. > Flynn doesn't seem to offer a metrics stream, only logs Something I think should be built-in, but there are many off the shelf solutions which can be deployed to Flynn as apps. > Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack Flynn has built-in buildpacks but also supports running custom buildpacks (see https://flynn.io/docs/apps#buildpacks https://flynn.io/docs/apps#buildpacks). If you just want to deploy binaries, you can either: - use the inline buildpack: https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-inline https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-inline - deploy a tarball: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/306#issuecomment-233211243 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/306#issuecomment-23321... - deploy a Docker image: https://flynn.io/docs/docker https://flynn.io/docs/docker > I couldn't find anything about role-based access control in Flynn, something Cloud Foundry has (which can be backed by LDAP for enterprises) Flynn does not currently have strict access control, but work is very much on the way, see our security improvements project: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/projects/1 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/projects/1. > Flynn only appears to route HTTP traffic, so no TCP routing for IoT workloads Flynn supports TCP routes, although it does not seem to be documented very well: https://flynn.io/docs/cli#route https://flynn.io/docs/cli#route
  - EngineerBetter 10y ago
    Thanks for the clarifications! The Flynn auto-heal - does that monitor infrastructure (ie at the VM level) or is that process auto-healing?
    - Titanous 10y ago
      That's at the process level only currently.
- arekkas 10y ago
  * Flynn builds apps from source, so not sure how that works for compiled Java/Go, or anything you'd run with a binary buildpack You can deploy docker images, at least that was the case one year ago * Cloud Foundry is run at massive scale in production for mission-critical workloads by banks, payment processors, IoT data ingesters, manufacturing companies, research companies, governments and everything inbetween. I can't see any evidence of the same being said for Flynn. I think that's the whole idea behind flynn. Instead of being heavy-weight, complicated to deploy (no BOSH) and resource intensive, you can run a cluster with 3 nodes and deploy a ton of services there. It's not targeted at banks, it's targeted at people who don't want to use heroku or pivotal or GCE. And this makes it a lot faster in many ways, at least last time I checked.
  - EngineerBetter 10y ago
    That's cool about Docker images. Cloud Foundry has a binary buildpack, and the Java buildpack deals with .jars, which means slightly lower complexity for the end user than needing to roll a Docker image. CF does Docker too now, which is nice for compatibility, but I think people are missing the point by deploying images instead of apps. Fair points about BOSH, it's got a steep learning curve (cliff). I'd love to see Cloud Foundry have an install experience that's along the lines of "Hey, here's some IP addresses and an SSH key. Go install yourself there."