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Flynn Beta (YC S14)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- danielsiders 12y agoFlynn cofounder here, happy to answer any questions
- cdonaghy 12y agoWhat exactly is it? I'm sorry, I don't think I have enough experience to understand from your website
- danielsiders 12y agoIn the simplest sense it's an open source Paas (think Heroku), but with much more flexible technology. It's designed for ops teams who can run a single platform instead of doing custom deployment work for each application and database
- jamra 12y agoCould you explain to me what an ops team is? Could you also explain to me what running a single platform instead of custom deployment means? A lot of solutions solve that problem. I don't understand how your product does that.
- danielsiders 12y agoThe ops team at a company is the group responsible for running and scaling the apps after they've been written. The role varies from company to company, but in general they manage databases, underlying infrastructure, and other technology that power apps. You could think of them as the sysadmins or IT team that powers especially public-facing services and websites. Think Twitter, HN, etc. The people in charge for making sure there are no fail whales are the ops team.
- cdonaghy 12y agoAwesome, Thanks!
- mdda 12y agoThat seems like something that should be on the website...
- tekacs 12y agoIs ongoing development primarily being funded by your sponsors and do you have any (public) plans along other paths for the future?
- danielsiders 12y agoWe're currently raising a VC round (we're in the current YC batch). We've already done paid support contracts on the enterprise side and are developing the management service into a SaaS offering.
- dk8996 12y agoOne thing that I really like with other PasS companies is that they package that content up -- setup, architecture, documentation of a n-tier application (I am assuming you already built something like that for contracting work). How would I create a website with database and caching ect... using your services.
- tekacs 12y agoGreat, thanks for sharing. :)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jhawk28 12y agoAny plans to integrate with kubernetes?
- Titanous 12y agoNo, we have our own scheduling framework and schedulers inspired by the Google Omega paper.
- waitingkuo 12y agoDoes https://dashboard.flynn.io https://dashboard.flynn.io build on top of the beta version of Flynn?
- nogox 12y agoI don't really understand this: "Non-cooperating services often use service discovery information in configuration, such as the backends for a load balancer defined in an HAproxy configuration. A generalized configuration rendering system is used to tie service discovery into most non-cooperating services." The problem is to generate the config file, which etcd doesn't help.
- Titanous 12y agoWe can use sdutil[0] to render info from service discovery into a config template. [0] https://github.com/flynn/flynn/blob/master/sdutil/configure.go https://github.com/flynn/flynn/blob/master/sdutil/configure....
- sanderjd 12y agoLooks like a neat project, best of luck to you! This is a nitpick, but it really turns me off from coming back to applications, and I'd want to know about it if I were you: after I registered on dashboard.flynn.io, neither the password remembering functionality built into chrome nor my password manager (LastPass) seems to know how to autofill your login form. I haven't looked into why that would be at all, but it's a real nuisance!
- jfarmer 12y agoWhat is Flynn? I read the link and the homepage on my phone, and couldn't figure out for the life of me what the product was.
- brusch64 12y agoSorry to be cruel - but I really think you should cut down the usage of buzzwords and abbrevations on your homepage and in describing your service.
- dubcanada 12y agoI find it almost impossible to figure out what to do with Flynn after I have installed it (just comparing it to deis, deis on the other hand has a large amount of documentation). Is there going to be some more documentation on how exactly stuff is setup and how to manage it now that it is in beta?
- danielsiders 12y agoYep, tons more, soon. For now, start here https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/master/demo https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/master/demo. We're moving this and more like it to the docs.
- jamespacileo 12y agoDocumentation is key for adoption, creating a community and having more contributors. I hope they address this soon. :)
- kevinflo 12y agoI feel like this post would benefit from a succinct description of what the product is either in the title or on the linked page.
- dubcanada 12y agoI'm not sure if the title box has enough characters to explain it properly. Basically it's a PaaS framework that can be hosted on your own environment. Anyone have any ideas on what to put?
- ferrantim 12y agoI'd describe Flynn as a private version of Heroku, not sure if they'd like that description or not though.
- bnb 12y agoFlynn is a (adjective) PaaS platform that can be hosted on your own servers so you can make it work for you. Flynn can (verb) as a PaaS platform that allows you to do what you need to within your existing infrastructure. Flynn runs on your servers as a PaaS platform that you can build upon to (whatever a PaaS does). I don't really know what PaaSes do, but those should work if you find interesting words (not just generic ones) to put where I've noted. Adding extremely informative details in a sub heading would be very beneficial.
- dccarmo 12y agoI tried reading most of the site and didn't understand what exactly it is. Am I the only one who doesn't have a clue on what "ops" is/are?
- a2kadet 12y agoThis was my take away. I just figured the people who need this product would understand. I'm still really confused.
- dk8996 12y agoI know what "ops" is... but they do need to work on better messaging of their product (it's hard to do). I kinda missed the point of what they are doing, how are they better than AWS OpsWorks or other PaSS.
- elyrly 12y agoNope i spent a few minutes browsing the site and still don't understand the solution they present.
- icebraining 12y agoIt's Ops as in DevOps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devops
- dccarmo 12y agoThanks!
- danielsiders 12y agoOps is what you do after you write an application. Deploying it to one or more servers, connecting to databases, detecting, diagnosing, and fixing problems. Flynn is a layer of software that sits between your application code and the servers it runs on to make all of that a lot easier, especially at scale.
- spitfire 12y agoFlynn is open source heroku.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bthomas 12y agoUnderstand it's hard to explain. I'd list the canonical use cases, so people know whether to dig in to the docs.
- morgante 12y agoFlynn still needs to do a much better job on the documentation front. It's entirely unclear how to use Flynn. Instead of just having vague architecture/philosophy discussions, they need very clear explanations. From the demo/documentation they do have, it's unclear why Flynn is better than Deis, Heroku, etc.[1] I had hoped that Flynn was/would be a tool for orchestrating complicated multi-container apps, not just deploying Procfiles. I don't need Procfiles, I need something which will let me integrate and orchestrate multiple Docker containers across multiple nodes. Most/many significant apps don't fit into the simplicity of Procfiles (we have over a dozen different services, some with relatively customize environments, all communicating with RabbitMQ middleware). At least for development, Docker containers have proven to be an ideal way to manage these services. As of yet, there doesn't seem to be a good tool for deploying them to production. I wish Flynn would tackle that head on (and document it!), instead of being yet another generic PaaS. [1] https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/master/demo https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/master/demo
- Titanous 12y agoWhile Flynn is capable of a lot more, as evidenced by its architecture, leading up to the first production release we're focused on solving some of the simpler use cases really well. A solid "private Heroku" was the primary desire of a lot of our early sponsors, and we want to make sure we deliver on that promise. Once Flynn is stable, we can focus on the more complex use cases which, frankly, are what really excites our team.
- neom 12y agoIs private heroku still the right thing to build? I don't know the answer, it just sounded like you're building it because you said you would, but along the way have you found other/better use cases?
- SEJeff 12y agoTake a look at Fedora's atomic host. Heck, if all you need is orchestration of multiple hosts with docker containers, you only need a single bit from project atomic, geard[1]. [1] http://openshift.github.io/geard/ http://openshift.github.io/geard/
- druiid 12y agoIt appears that download issues with the ruby buildpack still aren't fixed. Really you guys should be hosting these on your own S3 account as literally every time I've tried to use Flynn or Deis they are unusable because both utilities use heroku hosted buildpacks and they're consistently broken (slugbuilder related I think?).
- bacongobbler 12y agoWhat download issues do you speak of? They work great in Deis' test infrastructure: http://ci.deis.io/view/example-apps/job/test-integration-ruby-sinatra/ http://ci.deis.io/view/example-apps/job/test-integration-rub...
- druiid 12y ago-----> Ruby app detected ! ! Command: 'set -o pipefail; curl --fail --retry 3 --retry-delay 1 --connect-timeout 3 --max-time 30 https://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-ruby/bundler-1.6.3.tgz https://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-ruby/bu... -s -o - | tar zxf - ' failed unexpectedly: ! ! gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file ! tar: Child returned status 1 ! tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now I opened an issue request with Deis a while back for the same problem and they reported it being an upstream issue with slugbuilder. Edit: Heh, apparently we already talked about this https://github.com/deis/deis/issues/1016 https://github.com/deis/deis/issues/1016
- bacongobbler 12y agoYep. It was because slugbuilder didn't lock buildpacks to a known working version when you ran a `docker build`. It always pulled master, which may or may not work. We fixed that up, and we're in sync with Heroku's buildpack version that's running in prod now: https://github.com/deis/slugbuilder/blob/deis/builder/install-buildpacks#L20 https://github.com/deis/slugbuilder/blob/deis/builder/instal...
- druiid 12y ago
- zbyte64 12y agoFlynn lets you tie GIT deployment to a system that uses heroku buildpacks and launch using Docker containers. But what if I don't want to use a buildpack but a Dockerfile?
- bacongobbler 12y agoJust gonna leave this here... http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using-dockerfiles/ http://docs.deis.io/en/latest/using_deis/using-dockerfiles/
- Titanous 12y agoIf you have a Docker image on a registry somewhere you can create a release in Flynn from it using the `flynn release add` command (or the API).
- anonfunction 12y agoI think there is a bug on the pricing page. It appears that the startup plan is more expensive during beta. http://i.imgur.com/CtWIytj.png http://i.imgur.com/CtWIytj.png
- harrisreynolds 12y agoWho can come up with a better headline? I like "Open Source PaaS for the Future" https://www.dropbox.com/s/ret624lf739til4/Screenshot%202014-08-13%2018.19.00.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/ret624lf739til4/Screenshot%202014-... A more clear header would help with messaging.
- corobo 12y agoNot a huge fan of the "for the Future" bit but the rest at least says or hints a bit better as to what it is. I've been following flynn from the start but honestly I'm less sure of what it is now than I was before it started
- boboohaze 12y agoBut why use Flynn? Getting a CoreOS cluster up and controlling it with Fleet, and deploying docker images to it, seems quite a bit easier.
- ibisum 12y agoCredit-card only option? Sorry, but no thanks. I'll come back to Flynn when I can pay for it with a method other than credit card. (Startups should not assume the whole world wants to use credit cards.)
- guybrushT 12y agoAs others have raised points about need for better documentation and "didn't understand what exactly it is", I wanted to say that the Story of Flynn is missing a very clear "Why Flynn?". That seems to be at the root of why others aren't fully able to understand you. So, Why Flynn? Some sentences selected from the post: "It regularly took longer to deploy apps to AWS or our own servers than to write them....It wasn’t just about deploying stateless web apps, it was scaling them....Ops could manage a single platform that provided self-serve resources for development, testing, and production to the rest of the organization...." I know its not popular to say this: would Google App Engine have solved this, since it was made for this specific use case? The "ops" could have been simplified (yes, GAE has problems - there is lock-in, pricing etc. but that kicks in only after Tent.io has many many users - and that would be a good/welcome problem to solve. Maybe I am missing something - but I would really like to understand "Why Flynn was made?". Thank you in advance for the clarification.
- stevedekorte 12y agoFwiw, I'd find a single line description of what Flynn is helpful. I gave up trying to find out after seeing a long story on the about page.