14 ms·

RIP Flynn.io

285 points by corobo 6y ago

dedene 6y ago
Is there a good maintained alternative?
- jrnkntl 6y ago
  I'm happily using Dokku[1] and another one in this host your own PaaS space is CapRover[2] [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/ [2] https://caprover.com https://caprover.com
  - simplify 6y ago
    I can second caprover. Personally I find it easier to use than dokku. The admin ui is quite nice.
    - josegonzalez 6y ago
      Aside from having an admin UI, would you be willing to talk a bit about how caprover is easier to use than dokku? Feel free to hit up the `@dokku` twitter account, catch us on the gliderlabs slack (https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com), or even provide feedback in the Discussions section of the primary Github repository (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions). (I am the dokku maintainer).
  - boramalper 6y ago
    I can second Dokku, though haven't used CapRover. Dokku has its quirks but it has served me well in the past two years.
    - josegonzalez 6y ago
      Maintainer of Dokku here. Would love to pick your brain as to what our quirks are and how we might avoid them in the future. Feel free to hit up the `@dokku` twitter account, catch us on the gliderlabs slack (https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com), or even provide feedback in the Discussions section of the primary Github repository (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions).
      - kevinob11 6y ago
        @josegonzalez, thanks so much for all of your work on Dokku and for being so responsive in the community for the last couple years. We tried Flynn at one point and had enough issues we moved back to dokku within 2 months and have been happily living on it for years now. You helped me directly with an issue with DB naming at one point, much appreciated!
      - LogicX 6y ago
        Going to take you up on this offer. We've been running Dokku in production for years; and have a few quirks which have resulted in us evaluating moving to k8s.
      - tebbers 6y ago
        Dokku is FANTASTIC, thank you so much for your work on it.
      - boramalper 6y ago
        @josegonzalez Thanks for the reply. :) I’ll try to write something down when I have some time.
  - faizshah 6y ago
    Kind of related: is there something like Dokku but for FaaS?
    - krts- 6y ago
      There's faasd [https://github.com/openfaas/faasd https://github.com/openfaas/faasd] which is OpenFaaS without the Kubernetes overhead.
      - geerlingguy 6y ago
        And alexellis is a pretty active maintainer.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago
  CapRover is a nice Docker-based PaaS you can run yourself: https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/
  - netcyrax 6y ago
    +1 on CapRover. Complete provider independent deployments. Just write a Dockerfile and you are ready to deploy.
- woudsma 6y ago
  I'm working on a self-hosted, open source PaaS called Swarmlet. I really like Dokku, but I needed something that's a bit more scalable to my needs. The installer is currently broken, I simply don't have enough time / bandwidth right now to work on it unfortunately. That said, if you want to contribute, please let me know! I hope to get things running again soon. https://swarmlet.dev https://swarmlet.dev or https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet
  - zebnyc 6y ago
    This looks amazing. Thanks
- rdli 6y ago
  Assuming you’re a company (as opposed to an individual), if you want a PAAS, there are a few different options that in my view are sustainable which I think is the key criteria for adopting something for your platform. - Heroku. Sure it’s a bit expensive but it’s still super easy if you’re a dev. - OpenShift. If you’re a really big enterprise, OpenShift is a reasonable choice for PAAS. But only if you’re huge. - Kubernetes. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it has a steep learning curve. But it’s open source, has a huge and growing ecosystem, and it has less lock in than any other PAAS-like thing that I can think of. The main downside of Kubernetes beyond its complexity is that you still have to build abstractions on top of it for your developers. But that world is improving regularly.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    I went through this evaluation process again recently for an open source project for a client and came to the conclusion that, for small projects, Heroku provides immense value. Given the features and free-tier add-ons it’s definitely worth the 7p/m and I don’t know if I would class it as expensive anymore when taking all it’s features into consideration. I’d like to see http2 support though. Watching and waiting for https://render.com https://render.com to mature a little as it seems slightly better value.
    - anurag 6y ago
      (Render founder) We're getting there. What are the biggest blockers for you right now?
- nathan_f77 6y ago
  Yes, I'm a huge fan of Convox [1]. One thing that don't make very clear is that the paid "Convox Pro" hosted console is optional, and convox/rack [2] is completely free and open source. You can set everything up with a single command, and then interact with your rack and app directly through the CLI. I really like how simple and opinionated it is, even though their new v3 version uses Kubernetes behind the scenes. [1] https://convox.com https://convox.com [2] https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack
dhosek 6y ago
Aside from an easily-missed sidebar, there's nothing that indicates what flynn was. This happens a lot it seems with XXX is dead posts on HN. The link is to something that says that XXX is dead but there's often little or no indication of what XXX was in the first place.
- walski 6y ago
  In this case there is a very recent version of their landing page on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210203121152/https://flynn.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210203121152/https://flynn.io/ (Not that the page had changed in any meaningful way in pretty much forever)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sytse 6y ago
  Their tagline was: “Flynn is an open source platform (PaaS) for running applications in production.” In some way an alternative for using Kubernetes and managed services of cloud providers. I think there is a need for something that is easier to use than Kubernetes. I’ve started the 5 minute production app for this. The idea is to use managed services and Terraform to make stateful services easy. This way you’re not locked in but have flexibility going forward.
  - klohto 6y ago
    Go with Nomad then
- riffic 6y ago
  seriously the lack of context surrounding these sort of posts is lazy and awful.
  - corobo 6y ago
    You can submit text or url mate. I would love to have given you context. I'm not going to cram a companies history into the title, it wouldn't have got any upvotes :) In simple terms it was a self hosted Heroku. It got massive attention here and raised a load of cash before kubernetes etc were a thing
evoxmusic 6y ago
Qovery is partially open source and have a 100% free plan for individual developers. https://www.qovery.com https://www.qovery.com
neom 6y ago
Jeff Lindsay who was heavily involved in developing Flynn (and Dokku) is working on a pretty cool new project called Tractor, it's basically a modern Smalltalk environment: https://github.com/sponsors/progrium https://github.com/sponsors/progrium
jabo 6y ago
I’m sad/surprised that a project with almost 8K stars on GitHub is dead. Does anyone know why they decided to not build/maintain it anymore?
- smashah 6y ago
  I am also extremely interested as to why this stopped being maintained.
  - jpgvm 6y ago
    Macro: Kubernetes took all the air out of the room. Micro: Lack of funding. i.e pretty much the same as everything else that has went the way of the dodo in this space.
- breakingcups 6y ago
  If a project is primarily developed by one company, contributions will drop to approximately zero once funding runs out. Even if outside people are willing to contribute, there is usually no one with maintainer / merge powers who is willing or permitted to step up to handle contributions.
  - toyg 6y ago
    With enough alternative commercial supporters, someone will fork and keep going. But in this case it looks like there was no ecosystem of alternative providers who could pick up the mantle.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Software is hard [0], especially in the face of a rapidly changing tech industry. Incumbents are upended on a regular basis and even the mightiest FOSS projects falter, some less violently than others. Besides, stars may not be the right metric unlike community participation [1]. Could Flynn have picked up community participation had it been donated to a Foundation like, say, the Cloud Native Foundation? Another reason could be that because momentum is everything when faced with stiff competition, things may have slowed down for Flynn. Some of the things that slow projects down: 1. Overwhelming feature gap. 2. Spiralling technical debt. 3. Rise in dramatic hard-to-fix bugs. 4. Inadequate staffing / inability to keep up with the changing ecosystem. Also, looks like the lead developer (@titanous) has deleted their blog and tweets too, and so, it is likely we will never know what went on. Hopefully, they consider publishing their thoughts so that we may all learn and improve. I wonder if Pieter Hintjens (of the ZeroMQ fame) had the right idea that a software project should always attempt to reach "completion" and stay "completed". That is, you complete one key part after the other and build on top of that solid foundation that doesn't change...? This approach may help keep things in control for a small team of core developers to tackle issues arising from taking up as complex a task as Flynn's. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD648.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [1] https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks-extention-the-ross-index-and-the-fastest-growing-startups-in-q3-2020-7aee7fa7eed7 https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks...
ponyous 6y ago
Our staging environment is down because something went wrong with Flynn a week or two ago and there is absolutely no information on how to debug it. I'm happy they marked is as unmaintained because I got the impression it wasn't all that well maintained for last few years - can't remember why anymore, but something to do with having to use master branch otherwise the package was 3 years old in ubuntu main repository... I guess we'll be moving staging to k8s without hesitation now. It was decent and served the purpose for our staging environment. Rip.
oap_bram 6y ago
I was definitely a _very_ late adopter of the program, but because it was so badly documented and seemingly dead even a few months ago I dropped it as well. I use https://fly.io https://fly.io now for this purpose. It's not self-hosted, but it does the job for me :)
- ornornor 6y ago
  > I use https://fly.io https://fly.io now for this purpose. That looks pretty cool, thanks.
- jimaek 6y ago
  Consider checking https://appfleet.com https://appfleet.com as well, we worked a lot to simplify the process with a nice UI and a constantly improving UX Disclosure: I work for appfleet
dig1 6y ago
Sad news, but I'm not surprised with this. The complete ecosystem was "killed" (if that can be said) with K8s buzz and hipsterism (sorry guys, but I see K8s as Hadoop/BigData of modern days - a solution from a huge company that has no place in 90% setups). Alternatives like Deis [2] moved to K8s a long time ago. My favorite tool for some time, Rancher [3], did that as well. I've been using Dokku [1] for a few years on a small setup, surprisingly without a single problem, taking into account it was written in "not-so-cool" bash. And I was considering Flynn as the next step if I need to scale it because Dokku doesn't have clustering support (added: looks like clustering support for Dokku is in work [4]). After many checks, I got the impression Flynn simply wasn't there yet. Either because of low development pace, low number of supported appliances, or something else, I'm not sure. In the end, I picked up Ansible for more distributed installations. [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/ [2] https://deislabs.io/ https://deislabs.io/ [3] https://rancher.com/ https://rancher.com/ [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bgpw5w/flynn_vs_dokku/elqdska https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bgpw5w/flynn_vs_dok...
- babaganoosh89 6y ago
  Caprover is also nice, you use docker files instead of heroku build packs and it has a nice gui.
  - conradfr 6y ago
    I recently transitionned from capistrano deployments to CapRover and it's mostly working fine. The variety of ways to deploy apps was especially relevant to my situation. My biggest complaint would be the non-zero downside deployment.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Dokku has been a workhorse for me. For all the fears of “but what about redundancy?” I have run a fairly successfully service on it for five or so years on a single Vultr VPS and made more money from that than any other side project or all of them combined. Glad I directed my attention to the product and not the devops like I had in the past. 10/10 would recommend.
endisneigh 6y ago
What ever happened to Docker swarm? Considering how popular Docker (still) is, I'm surprised it's not solidly #2 behind K8s.
- mintplant 6y ago
  The Docker company gave up on all that and switched to selling "developer tools".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
zimpenfish 6y ago
Worked for a company a couple of years ago that used Flynn (with one of the maintainers) and it was pretty easy to use and understand. I guess it's Dokku or Nomad for my next adventure then!
_kst_ 6y ago
UPDATE: The README.md has now been updated with a link to the older version that describes what the project is about. Thanks to the maintainer for doing this. The remainder of this comment is obsolete (except for the last paragraph). As others have mentioned, the current site (README.md) says very little about what Flynn is. You can see a version of the repo and README.md, just before it became unmaintained, here: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/2c20757de8b32a40ba06f7e5b363b2d4dd6b332e https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/2c20757de8b32a40ba06f7e5... IMHO it would have been much better if the maintainers had added the "Flynn is Unmaintained" information to the top of the README.md rather than removing all the existing information. I've submitted a GitHub issue suggesting it: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/4623 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/4623 A plea to project maintainers in general: Please include enough information in your top-level README (or README.md, or README.whatever) so that someone who has never heard of your project can find get a good overview. I've also seen READMEs that only discuss the most recent changes. That's fine for readers who have already been following the project, but not for a more general audience.
postit 6y ago
I'm disgusted that all competition to k8s is dying a slow death. I'm counting the days for nomad with expectation and whishing something better will arise.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I have the feeling that nobody is making (or trying to make) any money on Nomad? Their cash cow must be terraform.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    Hashicorp is selling enterprise versions of nomad which are really expensive, the same with consul enterprise and terraform enterprise. They have high pricings so they don‘t need thousands of customers.
- m1keil 6y ago
  Curious about what are your pain points with Nomad? We are using it and it's pretty good. Biggest pain with it is the lack of versioned documentation IMHO. But other than that it can do wonderful job in scheduling workloads.
  - postit 6y ago
    The amount of tooling you have to write yourself to keep a sane workflow is excrutiating.
    - m1keil 6y ago
      indeed, can relate!
hiharryhere 6y ago
I used Flynn for a side project. When it worked it was awesome and simple, but it was a bit too unpredictable and flakey for me to feel comfortable using it in my company. Dokku has been rock solid for almost 5 years now for my business. Would love to have multiple nodes but otherwise fantastic and easy. I had to move off Heroku as my customers require an Australian based host and heroku doesn’t support the region. Migrating was a breeze. I wanted to love Flynn and checked back in it every year or so but the blogs stopped a long while back and the brief documentation never really fleshed out.
- golemiprague 6y ago
  How do you deal with maintaining and securing the servers? The big advantage of Heroku is that for small projects you don't have to deal with server maintenance, you just upload and forget. Isn't using Dokku kind of miss the whole point?
  - josegonzalez 6y ago
    Maintainer of Dokku here. If you can use Heroku, I would encourage you to do so. While the price seems high, the value add you get from just its feature-set and the ecosystem is tremendous. Seriously, even if you just pay 7 bucks for an always-on dyno, you can get pretty damn far without needing to worry about a server. I've been on a few platform teams, and we've always been _miles_ away from the functionality Heroku provides. That aside, there are a number of reasons something like Dokku (or insert your favorite self-managed platform here) may be a good idea for your organization: - You need to own your availability: With Heroku, you're at the mercy of Heroku, Salesforce, and Amazon (roughly in that order). Sometimes there is a mandate that your org cannot use services provided by certain companies, or you need an SLA that you can control for a third party. While I don't necessarily agree with those reasons, there are plenty of cases where owning your availability is more important than saving on the cost of building and running the platform. - You cannot use an external vendor: Sometimes you want something to run in your closet for the 40 self-hosted apps you run, and you cannot install Heroku in your closet. Maybe you work at a non-profit and you cannot easily justify the extra expense (either because of paperwork or because money is tight). Running your own platform is quite enticing in these sorts of cases. - Running "at scale" is expensive: If you work at a consulting firm and are working on a couple dozen apps for customers, something like Heroku can start adding up, especially if you want staging environments for functionality. We have a ton of users that switch to Dokku for staging, and then end up hosting in other places for HA functionality they don't want to maintain. - While we might support Kubernetes and Nomad, the complexity of maintaining these systems just for staging can seem silly. - The platform does not support the functionality you need: While Heroku is _excellent_, it doesn' support everything, and it doesn't need to in order to service it's customers. When you find yourself reaching outside the box, that is when owning your platform becomes important. Yeah, Dokku might seem like it's missing the point, and yet there are thousands of companies - small and large - building and maintaining their own version of Heroku (with varying degrees of success). I think in that sense, Dokku does quite well since it is flexible enough that it's "batteries included but removable".
jpgvm 6y ago
I was one of the maintainers of Flynn for a period of time and I still use it on a personal cluster that has been humming along problem free for several years. I'm very sad to see it go of course but the writing was on the wall for a long time after the demise of all non-k8s container management systems. This is the ultimate fate of tools like Nomad and services like ECS. k8s changed the game by providing a target API/platform that gained enough traction to force each of the large providers to support a managed implementation of it. I miss my time working on Flynn, we were a very small team but we wrote some good software and I learnt a ton in the process.
- mwarkentin 6y ago
  I don’t see ECS going anywhere. AWS still maintains old services like SimpleDB and ECS development seems to be speeding up if anything.
  - jpgvm 6y ago
    We will see. My prediction is ECS becomes pretty much a zombie service. It's neither easier to use or better than managed k8s in any dimension that matters so overtime will bleed even more market share. What AWS has to be careful with here is that when people make the move to k8s they might depart AWS altogether and go to GCP/Azure as you are throwing away a lot of their lock-in in the process. This would be less of a problem if EKS was better so they probably need to be spending more time there than ECS, that ship has sailed.
- vforvendettador 6y ago
  Disagree with your assessment for other container orchestrations. Agreed that k8s has changed the game, but ECS has the support of the behemoth that is AWS and it has huge existing applications relying on it. ECS Fargate makes it easy to deploy containers easily. Note that I don't work for AWS, but do use AWS, Azure and GCP cloud services, I don't have any vested interest in ECS. I do believe that ECS has a long life in its future.
  - jpgvm 6y ago
Aeolun 6y ago
Wonder if anyone will take this up now, since its BSD licensed and all. Guess it’d have to have a different name though.
danielsiders 6y ago
Cofounder here. We’re surprised and flattered at the interest and discussion. For those wondering why we shut down here’s a brief summary: We created Flynn to be Heroku that you could run on your own infrastructure (cloud or otherwise). We started Flynn as a crowdfunded project with support mainly from other startups, we imagined it would be non-commercial and community-driven. After the prototype it became clear that we would need a full time team to develop and maintain the project. When we couldn’t find anyone who wanted to fund the project long term we applied to YC and then raised a seed round which let us build a 1.0. Unfortunately we were never able to raise more VC so we spent several years trying to build a business that would allow us to keep developing the project. We spent the last four years with a skeleton team and while we were able to build a business doing “ops as a service” for other startups we ultimately couldn’t generate enough revenue to cover both development/features and the 24/7 on call team we needed. While we were able to support our paying customers we couldn’t deliver the features we wanted to build or support unpaid open source users. We also take stability and support really seriously. We were extremely uncomfortable with the fact that people were running Flynn but didn’t know enough to run it safely. So we’d get panicked emails and github issues from users who couldn’t pay us but needed help. That’s a terrible situation for everyone involved. The ecosystem has come a long way since we started (we were one of the first Docker powered projects and started about a year before kubernetes was announced). But we still feel like there’s a need for something like Flynn :( Unfortunately it’s expensive to develop full-featured platforms and we could never get VCs interested in a Series A. The 24/7 on call lifestyle got to be too much for our team, especially during COVID so with no prospects of things changing we decided to call it quits.
- Titanous 6y ago
  Other cofounder here. I just wanted to add that we still have some t-shirts and stickers left. So if you want some defunct project/startup swag, we'd love to send it to you! https://shop.flynn.io https://shop.flynn.io
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I posted a question for the co-founders, it's next to your comment. Would you mind taking a look, please? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298288
brunoqc 6y ago
Oh I totally forgot about Flynn and I even had a t-shirt for fixing a typo.
f430 6y ago
never heard of it and dont really care for it tbh
hacktember 6y ago
CLU: "Kevin Flynn! Where are you now?!?"
sungrokshim 6y ago
Hi everyone, I'm one of the maintainers of Porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). We are building a Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud. We consider Porter to be the next-gen successor to Flynn in the era of k8s. We had the pleasure of getting on a call with the Flynn founders last week and learned so much from their experience. It was incredible to hear the first-hand account of the past 7 years building Flynn (seriously, what a ride). We took their lessons and advice to heart and hope to fill the void Flynn is leaving behind. To the founders of Flynn and all contributors, thanks so much for building such an awesome project and paving the way. Porter is still in its early stage, and we're super excited to start sharing our progress with the community. Exciting stuff coming your way soon - stay tuned!
danielsiders 6y ago
Cofounder here again. I just wanted to say that while we’re sad to shut down and definitely didn’t accomplish everything we wanted to we are deeply grateful for having had the chance to build something significant and get past a 1.0. Our original crowdfunding round and supporters - almost all of whom found us on HN, Y Combinator, and our seed investors helped make that possible (plus of course all our open source contributors, alpha and beta users, early customers, and even the people who filed GitHub issues panicked because their sites had just gone down). Most of our team worked together on Tent (protocol for decentralized social networking) before this which no VC would get behind. So we know how much it sucks to have a great idea that no one will pay for you to build. We’re very grateful to HN for the opportunity to build something so cool. Neither of those projects would have been possible without HN. I know for a fact that we only got meetings, term sheets, into YC, and more on the strength of the HN comments and later the GitHub stars. Before we had a working product we could at least say, “hey, these people all say they want what we’re trying to build” and that got us in the door. We had lots of different proof points to show investors and even customers, but the most important thing was the number of upvotes and enthusiasm of the comments. Thank you all for being so open minded and supporting our work. We literally wouldn’t have been allowed to do it without you. Hope to have something even better to share with you all one day.
ankurd-runx 6y ago
Sad to hear about Flynn - it inspired us to start building a modern open source PaaS last year. We're currently running a closed beta with a bunch of companies and still have a few spots left. Feel free to reach out at info@runx.dev if anyone is interested!
cruxari 6y ago
Just reading about this, and looking at the Flynn website from the archives, it looks to me that Flynn does/did more or less the same as Cloud Foundry does? If Flynn was still active, what would be the main reasons you'd chose it over the "cf push" experience? Disclaimer: I have not used Flynn myself before stumbling over this thread, but I'm very interested in understanding the above given the ongoing discussions now of the future of CF.
wilsonfiifi 6y ago
This is a bit sad to read. I mainly use Dokku but having tried Flynn I think they had something great going on. Ultimately I reverted back to Dokku because I had to modify my application to fit Flynn's deployment style (no automatic redirection from http to https for example). Of all the open source PaaS that mimic Heroku to a certain degree, I stick to Dokku because I can always fall back to Heroku with minimal app rewrite since I use buildpacks. This might not be an issue if you deploy with DockerFiles though.
tpetry 6y ago
The problem with all these self-hosted PaaS is that they have to reinvent the wheel. Every PaaS needs some database to store information. So what's really missing is that someone would build a self-hosted RDS. A complete solution with a good backup concept (e.g. wall-g for postgresql), ability to restore from backups and in later versions maybe the ability to setup read replicas and do manual failovers for high availability (because automatic is still not easy). So if there would be such a solution every PaaS could just say use "awesome free rds" for database storage and they have to implement a lot less functionality. And even if you don't want to use a PaaS and just install everything directly on a server, a DBaaS solution is still needed by a lot of folks.
huxflux 6y ago
So sorry to hear this. A nasty strike on the self-hosting folks out there. All the tips of "partially open-source" solutions in this thread make me want to go back to bed.

RIP Flynn.io

285 points by corobo 6y ago

dedene 6y ago

Is there a good maintained alternative?

jrnkntl 6y ago
I'm happily using Dokku[1] and another one in this host your own PaaS space is CapRover[2] [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/ [2] https://caprover.com https://caprover.com
- simplify 6y ago
  I can second caprover. Personally I find it easier to use than dokku. The admin ui is quite nice.
  - josegonzalez 6y ago
    Aside from having an admin UI, would you be willing to talk a bit about how caprover is easier to use than dokku? Feel free to hit up the `@dokku` twitter account, catch us on the gliderlabs slack (https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com), or even provide feedback in the Discussions section of the primary Github repository (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions). (I am the dokku maintainer).
- boramalper 6y ago
  I can second Dokku, though haven't used CapRover. Dokku has its quirks but it has served me well in the past two years.
  - josegonzalez 6y ago
    Maintainer of Dokku here. Would love to pick your brain as to what our quirks are and how we might avoid them in the future. Feel free to hit up the `@dokku` twitter account, catch us on the gliderlabs slack (https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com https://glider-slackin.herokuapp.com), or even provide feedback in the Discussions section of the primary Github repository (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions).
    - kevinob11 6y ago
      @josegonzalez, thanks so much for all of your work on Dokku and for being so responsive in the community for the last couple years. We tried Flynn at one point and had enough issues we moved back to dokku within 2 months and have been happily living on it for years now. You helped me directly with an issue with DB naming at one point, much appreciated!
    - LogicX 6y ago
      Going to take you up on this offer. We've been running Dokku in production for years; and have a few quirks which have resulted in us evaluating moving to k8s.
    - tebbers 6y ago
      Dokku is FANTASTIC, thank you so much for your work on it.
    - boramalper 6y ago
      @josegonzalez Thanks for the reply. :) I’ll try to write something down when I have some time.
- faizshah 6y ago
  Kind of related: is there something like Dokku but for FaaS?
  - krts- 6y ago
    There's faasd [https://github.com/openfaas/faasd https://github.com/openfaas/faasd] which is OpenFaaS without the Kubernetes overhead.
    - geerlingguy 6y ago
      And alexellis is a pretty active maintainer.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
CapRover is a nice Docker-based PaaS you can run yourself: https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/
- netcyrax 6y ago
  +1 on CapRover. Complete provider independent deployments. Just write a Dockerfile and you are ready to deploy.
woudsma 6y ago
I'm working on a self-hosted, open source PaaS called Swarmlet. I really like Dokku, but I needed something that's a bit more scalable to my needs. The installer is currently broken, I simply don't have enough time / bandwidth right now to work on it unfortunately. That said, if you want to contribute, please let me know! I hope to get things running again soon. https://swarmlet.dev https://swarmlet.dev or https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet
- zebnyc 6y ago
  This looks amazing. Thanks
rdli 6y ago
Assuming you’re a company (as opposed to an individual), if you want a PAAS, there are a few different options that in my view are sustainable which I think is the key criteria for adopting something for your platform. - Heroku. Sure it’s a bit expensive but it’s still super easy if you’re a dev. - OpenShift. If you’re a really big enterprise, OpenShift is a reasonable choice for PAAS. But only if you’re huge. - Kubernetes. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it has a steep learning curve. But it’s open source, has a huge and growing ecosystem, and it has less lock in than any other PAAS-like thing that I can think of. The main downside of Kubernetes beyond its complexity is that you still have to build abstractions on top of it for your developers. But that world is improving regularly.
- jamil7 6y ago
  I went through this evaluation process again recently for an open source project for a client and came to the conclusion that, for small projects, Heroku provides immense value. Given the features and free-tier add-ons it’s definitely worth the 7p/m and I don’t know if I would class it as expensive anymore when taking all it’s features into consideration. I’d like to see http2 support though. Watching and waiting for https://render.com https://render.com to mature a little as it seems slightly better value.
  - anurag 6y ago
    (Render founder) We're getting there. What are the biggest blockers for you right now?
nathan_f77 6y ago
Yes, I'm a huge fan of Convox [1]. One thing that don't make very clear is that the paid "Convox Pro" hosted console is optional, and convox/rack [2] is completely free and open source. You can set everything up with a single command, and then interact with your rack and app directly through the CLI. I really like how simple and opinionated it is, even though their new v3 version uses Kubernetes behind the scenes. [1] https://convox.com https://convox.com [2] https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack

dhosek 6y ago

Aside from an easily-missed sidebar, there's nothing that indicates what flynn was. This happens a lot it seems with XXX is dead posts on HN. The link is to something that says that XXX is dead but there's often little or no indication of what XXX was in the first place.

walski 6y ago
In this case there is a very recent version of their landing page on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210203121152/https://flynn.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210203121152/https://flynn.io/ (Not that the page had changed in any meaningful way in pretty much forever)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sytse 6y ago
Their tagline was: “Flynn is an open source platform (PaaS) for running applications in production.” In some way an alternative for using Kubernetes and managed services of cloud providers. I think there is a need for something that is easier to use than Kubernetes. I’ve started the 5 minute production app for this. The idea is to use managed services and Terraform to make stateful services easy. This way you’re not locked in but have flexibility going forward.
- klohto 6y ago
  Go with Nomad then
riffic 6y ago
seriously the lack of context surrounding these sort of posts is lazy and awful.
- corobo 6y ago
  You can submit text or url mate. I would love to have given you context. I'm not going to cram a companies history into the title, it wouldn't have got any upvotes :) In simple terms it was a self hosted Heroku. It got massive attention here and raised a load of cash before kubernetes etc were a thing

evoxmusic 6y ago

Qovery is partially open source and have a 100% free plan for individual developers. https://www.qovery.com https://www.qovery.com

neom 6y ago

Jeff Lindsay who was heavily involved in developing Flynn (and Dokku) is working on a pretty cool new project called Tractor, it's basically a modern Smalltalk environment: https://github.com/sponsors/progrium https://github.com/sponsors/progrium

jabo 6y ago

I’m sad/surprised that a project with almost 8K stars on GitHub is dead. Does anyone know why they decided to not build/maintain it anymore?

smashah 6y ago
I am also extremely interested as to why this stopped being maintained.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  Macro: Kubernetes took all the air out of the room. Micro: Lack of funding. i.e pretty much the same as everything else that has went the way of the dodo in this space.
breakingcups 6y ago
If a project is primarily developed by one company, contributions will drop to approximately zero once funding runs out. Even if outside people are willing to contribute, there is usually no one with maintainer / merge powers who is willing or permitted to step up to handle contributions.
- toyg 6y ago
  With enough alternative commercial supporters, someone will fork and keep going. But in this case it looks like there was no ecosystem of alternative providers who could pick up the mantle.
ignoramous 6y ago
Software is hard [0], especially in the face of a rapidly changing tech industry. Incumbents are upended on a regular basis and even the mightiest FOSS projects falter, some less violently than others. Besides, stars may not be the right metric unlike community participation [1]. Could Flynn have picked up community participation had it been donated to a Foundation like, say, the Cloud Native Foundation? Another reason could be that because momentum is everything when faced with stiff competition, things may have slowed down for Flynn. Some of the things that slow projects down: 1. Overwhelming feature gap. 2. Spiralling technical debt. 3. Rise in dramatic hard-to-fix bugs. 4. Inadequate staffing / inability to keep up with the changing ecosystem. Also, looks like the lead developer (@titanous) has deleted their blog and tweets too, and so, it is likely we will never know what went on. Hopefully, they consider publishing their thoughts so that we may all learn and improve. I wonder if Pieter Hintjens (of the ZeroMQ fame) had the right idea that a software project should always attempt to reach "completion" and stay "completed". That is, you complete one key part after the other and build on top of that solid foundation that doesn't change...? This approach may help keep things in control for a small team of core developers to tackle issues arising from taking up as complex a task as Flynn's. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD648.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E... [1] https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks-extention-the-ross-index-and-the-fastest-growing-startups-in-q3-2020-7aee7fa7eed7 https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth-benchmarks...

ponyous 6y ago

Our staging environment is down because something went wrong with Flynn a week or two ago and there is absolutely no information on how to debug it. I'm happy they marked is as unmaintained because I got the impression it wasn't all that well maintained for last few years - can't remember why anymore, but something to do with having to use master branch otherwise the package was 3 years old in ubuntu main repository... I guess we'll be moving staging to k8s without hesitation now. It was decent and served the purpose for our staging environment. Rip.

oap_bram 6y ago

I was definitely a _very_ late adopter of the program, but because it was so badly documented and seemingly dead even a few months ago I dropped it as well. I use https://fly.io https://fly.io now for this purpose. It's not self-hosted, but it does the job for me :)

ornornor 6y ago
> I use https://fly.io https://fly.io now for this purpose. That looks pretty cool, thanks.
jimaek 6y ago
Consider checking https://appfleet.com https://appfleet.com as well, we worked a lot to simplify the process with a nice UI and a constantly improving UX Disclosure: I work for appfleet

dig1 6y ago

Sad news, but I'm not surprised with this. The complete ecosystem was "killed" (if that can be said) with K8s buzz and hipsterism (sorry guys, but I see K8s as Hadoop/BigData of modern days - a solution from a huge company that has no place in 90% setups). Alternatives like Deis [2] moved to K8s a long time ago. My favorite tool for some time, Rancher [3], did that as well. I've been using Dokku [1] for a few years on a small setup, surprisingly without a single problem, taking into account it was written in "not-so-cool" bash. And I was considering Flynn as the next step if I need to scale it because Dokku doesn't have clustering support (added: looks like clustering support for Dokku is in work [4]). After many checks, I got the impression Flynn simply wasn't there yet. Either because of low development pace, low number of supported appliances, or something else, I'm not sure. In the end, I picked up Ansible for more distributed installations. [1] https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/ [2] https://deislabs.io/ https://deislabs.io/ [3] https://rancher.com/ https://rancher.com/ [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bgpw5w/flynn_vs_dokku/elqdska https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bgpw5w/flynn_vs_dok...

babaganoosh89 6y ago
Caprover is also nice, you use docker files instead of heroku build packs and it has a nice gui.
- conradfr 6y ago
  I recently transitionned from capistrano deployments to CapRover and it's mostly working fine. The variety of ways to deploy apps was especially relevant to my situation. My biggest complaint would be the non-zero downside deployment.
IgorPartola 6y ago
Dokku has been a workhorse for me. For all the fears of “but what about redundancy?” I have run a fairly successfully service on it for five or so years on a single Vultr VPS and made more money from that than any other side project or all of them combined. Glad I directed my attention to the product and not the devops like I had in the past. 10/10 would recommend.

endisneigh 6y ago

What ever happened to Docker swarm? Considering how popular Docker (still) is, I'm surprised it's not solidly #2 behind K8s.

mintplant 6y ago
The Docker company gave up on all that and switched to selling "developer tools".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

zimpenfish 6y ago

Worked for a company a couple of years ago that used Flynn (with one of the maintainers) and it was pretty easy to use and understand. I guess it's Dokku or Nomad for my next adventure then!

_kst_ 6y ago

UPDATE: The README.md has now been updated with a link to the older version that describes what the project is about. Thanks to the maintainer for doing this. The remainder of this comment is obsolete (except for the last paragraph). As others have mentioned, the current site (README.md) says very little about what Flynn is. You can see a version of the repo and README.md, just before it became unmaintained, here: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/2c20757de8b32a40ba06f7e5b363b2d4dd6b332e https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/2c20757de8b32a40ba06f7e5... IMHO it would have been much better if the maintainers had added the "Flynn is Unmaintained" information to the top of the README.md rather than removing all the existing information. I've submitted a GitHub issue suggesting it: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/4623 https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/4623 A plea to project maintainers in general: Please include enough information in your top-level README (or README.md, or README.whatever) so that someone who has never heard of your project can find get a good overview. I've also seen READMEs that only discuss the most recent changes. That's fine for readers who have already been following the project, but not for a more general audience.

postit 6y ago

I'm disgusted that all competition to k8s is dying a slow death. I'm counting the days for nomad with expectation and whishing something better will arise.

Aeolun 6y ago
I have the feeling that nobody is making (or trying to make) any money on Nomad? Their cash cow must be terraform.
- tpetry 6y ago
  Hashicorp is selling enterprise versions of nomad which are really expensive, the same with consul enterprise and terraform enterprise. They have high pricings so they don‘t need thousands of customers.
m1keil 6y ago
Curious about what are your pain points with Nomad? We are using it and it's pretty good. Biggest pain with it is the lack of versioned documentation IMHO. But other than that it can do wonderful job in scheduling workloads.
- postit 6y ago
  The amount of tooling you have to write yourself to keep a sane workflow is excrutiating.
  - m1keil 6y ago
    indeed, can relate!

hiharryhere 6y ago

I used Flynn for a side project. When it worked it was awesome and simple, but it was a bit too unpredictable and flakey for me to feel comfortable using it in my company. Dokku has been rock solid for almost 5 years now for my business. Would love to have multiple nodes but otherwise fantastic and easy. I had to move off Heroku as my customers require an Australian based host and heroku doesn’t support the region. Migrating was a breeze. I wanted to love Flynn and checked back in it every year or so but the blogs stopped a long while back and the brief documentation never really fleshed out.

golemiprague 6y ago
How do you deal with maintaining and securing the servers? The big advantage of Heroku is that for small projects you don't have to deal with server maintenance, you just upload and forget. Isn't using Dokku kind of miss the whole point?
- josegonzalez 6y ago
  Maintainer of Dokku here. If you can use Heroku, I would encourage you to do so. While the price seems high, the value add you get from just its feature-set and the ecosystem is tremendous. Seriously, even if you just pay 7 bucks for an always-on dyno, you can get pretty damn far without needing to worry about a server. I've been on a few platform teams, and we've always been _miles_ away from the functionality Heroku provides. That aside, there are a number of reasons something like Dokku (or insert your favorite self-managed platform here) may be a good idea for your organization: - You need to own your availability: With Heroku, you're at the mercy of Heroku, Salesforce, and Amazon (roughly in that order). Sometimes there is a mandate that your org cannot use services provided by certain companies, or you need an SLA that you can control for a third party. While I don't necessarily agree with those reasons, there are plenty of cases where owning your availability is more important than saving on the cost of building and running the platform. - You cannot use an external vendor: Sometimes you want something to run in your closet for the 40 self-hosted apps you run, and you cannot install Heroku in your closet. Maybe you work at a non-profit and you cannot easily justify the extra expense (either because of paperwork or because money is tight). Running your own platform is quite enticing in these sorts of cases. - Running "at scale" is expensive: If you work at a consulting firm and are working on a couple dozen apps for customers, something like Heroku can start adding up, especially if you want staging environments for functionality. We have a ton of users that switch to Dokku for staging, and then end up hosting in other places for HA functionality they don't want to maintain. - While we might support Kubernetes and Nomad, the complexity of maintaining these systems just for staging can seem silly. - The platform does not support the functionality you need: While Heroku is _excellent_, it doesn' support everything, and it doesn't need to in order to service it's customers. When you find yourself reaching outside the box, that is when owning your platform becomes important. Yeah, Dokku might seem like it's missing the point, and yet there are thousands of companies - small and large - building and maintaining their own version of Heroku (with varying degrees of success). I think in that sense, Dokku does quite well since it is flexible enough that it's "batteries included but removable".

jpgvm 6y ago

I was one of the maintainers of Flynn for a period of time and I still use it on a personal cluster that has been humming along problem free for several years. I'm very sad to see it go of course but the writing was on the wall for a long time after the demise of all non-k8s container management systems. This is the ultimate fate of tools like Nomad and services like ECS. k8s changed the game by providing a target API/platform that gained enough traction to force each of the large providers to support a managed implementation of it. I miss my time working on Flynn, we were a very small team but we wrote some good software and I learnt a ton in the process.

mwarkentin 6y ago
I don’t see ECS going anywhere. AWS still maintains old services like SimpleDB and ECS development seems to be speeding up if anything.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  We will see. My prediction is ECS becomes pretty much a zombie service. It's neither easier to use or better than managed k8s in any dimension that matters so overtime will bleed even more market share. What AWS has to be careful with here is that when people make the move to k8s they might depart AWS altogether and go to GCP/Azure as you are throwing away a lot of their lock-in in the process. This would be less of a problem if EKS was better so they probably need to be spending more time there than ECS, that ship has sailed.
vforvendettador 6y ago
Disagree with your assessment for other container orchestrations. Agreed that k8s has changed the game, but ECS has the support of the behemoth that is AWS and it has huge existing applications relying on it. ECS Fargate makes it easy to deploy containers easily. Note that I don't work for AWS, but do use AWS, Azure and GCP cloud services, I don't have any vested interest in ECS. I do believe that ECS has a long life in its future.
- jpgvm 6y ago

Aeolun 6y ago

Wonder if anyone will take this up now, since its BSD licensed and all. Guess it’d have to have a different name though.

danielsiders 6y ago

Cofounder here. We’re surprised and flattered at the interest and discussion. For those wondering why we shut down here’s a brief summary: We created Flynn to be Heroku that you could run on your own infrastructure (cloud or otherwise). We started Flynn as a crowdfunded project with support mainly from other startups, we imagined it would be non-commercial and community-driven. After the prototype it became clear that we would need a full time team to develop and maintain the project. When we couldn’t find anyone who wanted to fund the project long term we applied to YC and then raised a seed round which let us build a 1.0. Unfortunately we were never able to raise more VC so we spent several years trying to build a business that would allow us to keep developing the project. We spent the last four years with a skeleton team and while we were able to build a business doing “ops as a service” for other startups we ultimately couldn’t generate enough revenue to cover both development/features and the 24/7 on call team we needed. While we were able to support our paying customers we couldn’t deliver the features we wanted to build or support unpaid open source users. We also take stability and support really seriously. We were extremely uncomfortable with the fact that people were running Flynn but didn’t know enough to run it safely. So we’d get panicked emails and github issues from users who couldn’t pay us but needed help. That’s a terrible situation for everyone involved. The ecosystem has come a long way since we started (we were one of the first Docker powered projects and started about a year before kubernetes was announced). But we still feel like there’s a need for something like Flynn :( Unfortunately it’s expensive to develop full-featured platforms and we could never get VCs interested in a Series A. The 24/7 on call lifestyle got to be too much for our team, especially during COVID so with no prospects of things changing we decided to call it quits.

Titanous 6y ago
Other cofounder here. I just wanted to add that we still have some t-shirts and stickers left. So if you want some defunct project/startup swag, we'd love to send it to you! https://shop.flynn.io https://shop.flynn.io
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I posted a question for the co-founders, it's next to your comment. Would you mind taking a look, please? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298288

brunoqc 6y ago

Oh I totally forgot about Flynn and I even had a t-shirt for fixing a typo.

f430 6y ago

never heard of it and dont really care for it tbh

hacktember 6y ago

CLU: "Kevin Flynn! Where are you now?!?"

sungrokshim 6y ago

Hi everyone, I'm one of the maintainers of Porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). We are building a Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud. We consider Porter to be the next-gen successor to Flynn in the era of k8s. We had the pleasure of getting on a call with the Flynn founders last week and learned so much from their experience. It was incredible to hear the first-hand account of the past 7 years building Flynn (seriously, what a ride). We took their lessons and advice to heart and hope to fill the void Flynn is leaving behind. To the founders of Flynn and all contributors, thanks so much for building such an awesome project and paving the way. Porter is still in its early stage, and we're super excited to start sharing our progress with the community. Exciting stuff coming your way soon - stay tuned!

danielsiders 6y ago

Cofounder here again. I just wanted to say that while we’re sad to shut down and definitely didn’t accomplish everything we wanted to we are deeply grateful for having had the chance to build something significant and get past a 1.0. Our original crowdfunding round and supporters - almost all of whom found us on HN, Y Combinator, and our seed investors helped make that possible (plus of course all our open source contributors, alpha and beta users, early customers, and even the people who filed GitHub issues panicked because their sites had just gone down). Most of our team worked together on Tent (protocol for decentralized social networking) before this which no VC would get behind. So we know how much it sucks to have a great idea that no one will pay for you to build. We’re very grateful to HN for the opportunity to build something so cool. Neither of those projects would have been possible without HN. I know for a fact that we only got meetings, term sheets, into YC, and more on the strength of the HN comments and later the GitHub stars. Before we had a working product we could at least say, “hey, these people all say they want what we’re trying to build” and that got us in the door. We had lots of different proof points to show investors and even customers, but the most important thing was the number of upvotes and enthusiasm of the comments. Thank you all for being so open minded and supporting our work. We literally wouldn’t have been allowed to do it without you. Hope to have something even better to share with you all one day.

ankurd-runx 6y ago

Sad to hear about Flynn - it inspired us to start building a modern open source PaaS last year. We're currently running a closed beta with a bunch of companies and still have a few spots left. Feel free to reach out at info@runx.dev if anyone is interested!

cruxari 6y ago

Just reading about this, and looking at the Flynn website from the archives, it looks to me that Flynn does/did more or less the same as Cloud Foundry does? If Flynn was still active, what would be the main reasons you'd chose it over the "cf push" experience? Disclaimer: I have not used Flynn myself before stumbling over this thread, but I'm very interested in understanding the above given the ongoing discussions now of the future of CF.

wilsonfiifi 6y ago

This is a bit sad to read. I mainly use Dokku but having tried Flynn I think they had something great going on. Ultimately I reverted back to Dokku because I had to modify my application to fit Flynn's deployment style (no automatic redirection from http to https for example). Of all the open source PaaS that mimic Heroku to a certain degree, I stick to Dokku because I can always fall back to Heroku with minimal app rewrite since I use buildpacks. This might not be an issue if you deploy with DockerFiles though.

tpetry 6y ago

The problem with all these self-hosted PaaS is that they have to reinvent the wheel. Every PaaS needs some database to store information. So what's really missing is that someone would build a self-hosted RDS. A complete solution with a good backup concept (e.g. wall-g for postgresql), ability to restore from backups and in later versions maybe the ability to setup read replicas and do manual failovers for high availability (because automatic is still not easy). So if there would be such a solution every PaaS could just say use "awesome free rds" for database storage and they have to implement a lot less functionality. And even if you don't want to use a PaaS and just install everything directly on a server, a DBaaS solution is still needed by a lot of folks.

huxflux 6y ago

So sorry to hear this. A nasty strike on the self-hosting folks out there. All the tips of "partially open-source" solutions in this thread make me want to go back to bed.