
Flynn 1.0 is here - sciurus
https://flynn.io/blog/one-point-oh
======
raimue
I like release announcements that explain in the very first sentence what this
piece of software does. Thank you.

~~~
SNvD7vEJ
Exactly.

Also, the logo links to the product page, not to some blog aggregation page as
many other announcement do.

~~~
pc86
This is usually a holdover of having the blog its own system (e.g. WordPress)
at blog.example.com or example.com/blog and having the rest of the site
managed by some other CMS or none at all.

Not saying there's a legitimate reason to do that, but just saying that's
usually the technical reason for it.

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fizzbatter
On this topic, i am looking for a simple "deploy this app to my machine" sort
of deployment scheme. I don't have fleets of machines, hell i will usually
only have a single machine. I mostly just want to ease the process of
deploying updates to my webapps.

What do you recommend? I spent some time last night looking into all the big
names atm, Flynn, Deis, Nomad, Kubernetes, Docker, etcetc. They all seem so
complex for my needs.

Sure, if my app grows, being able to boot up a few extra VMs, add them to my
"cloud", and then deploy my app to my new machines easily sounds appealing,
but honestly right now that's so beyond my scope that it seems silly. I just
want easy deployments, and easy installation of whatever i end up using
(Flynn/Deis/etc).

So with that said.. any opinions on the simplest? Dokku _seams_ to be the
simplest.. but it's hard for me to say atm, i don't have much experience of
perspective.

~~~
Titanous
Flynn aims to be the easiest to use among the available tools. We
intentionally limit the amount of configuration necessary to get up and
running and don't require you to bring together a bunch of components to make
a stack that works.

Dokku is architecturally simpler because it only focuses on single-host use
cases, but we hope Flynn is just as easy or easier to install and use.

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mikey_p
I very briefly looked into Flynn when evaluating self hosted PaaS offerings
and ended up settling on Dokku for now, and there are several features it had
that Flynn seemed to lack that were huge wins. Is there any plan to support
plugins in a similar way to Dokku? Specifically the volume storage plugin has
made deploying some apps that don't play nice with 12f stuff much easier.

The other thing that has come in very handy is being able to deploy Dockerfile
builds directly, is this something that Flynn can do as well, or is support
planned?

~~~
Titanous
> Is there any plan to support plugins in a similar way to Dokku? Specifically
> the volume storage plugin has made deploying some apps that don't play nice
> with 12f stuff much easier.

Flynn is natively highly available and multi-host, which makes doing volume
storage tricky. Our current immediate plan for this is to support NFS mounts
for apps so that you can point at an external file server (or service like AWS
EFS). Feel free to watch or thumbs-up this issue:
[https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/1521](https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/1521)

As far as plugins go, Flynn is entirely API-driven so you should be able to
hook in and do whatever you want without modifying Flynn itself. If you run
into something that you want to do that makes sense as an integration but
isn't currently possible, please open an issue and we can discuss how to make
it happen.

> The other thing that has come in very handy is being able to deploy
> Dockerfile builds directly, is this something that Flynn can do as well, or
> is support planned?

We support pushing Docker images to a registry built-in to Flynn:
[https://flynn.io/docs/docker](https://flynn.io/docs/docker)

Building Dockerfiles is currently tricky from a security and modularity
perspective as it requires running inside a privileged Docker daemon. There is
no way that I'm aware of to do a build without providing root or root-like
capabilities. If it was as simple as importing a package and using it in an
unprivileged container to perform the build, we'd definitely evaluate adding
support carefully.

~~~
gtirloni
> Building Dockerfiles is currently tricky from a security and modularity
> perspective as it requires running inside a privileged Docker daemon

Would it be easier with rkt?

~~~
Titanous
I'm not aware of any support for building images using Dockerfiles in rkt. My
understanding is that the Dockerfile build system is embedded in the docker
daemon.

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zo7
My name is Flynn, reading about all of this is endlessly entertaining :)

~~~
actsasbuffoon
Wow, these people really seem to like you! Have you considered putting some of
their endorsements on your résumé?

> You let people deploy and manage lots of applications, whether they’re
> microservices or monoliths, written in any combination of languages.

> You make running software faster and easier so developers can ship their
> code with less friction and spend more time creating applications and
> products.

> You bring resilient, scalable, and efficient infrastructure to everyone. You
> are a single, unified, easy-to-use platform.

> Developers and companies around the world are using you to power everything
> from their latest side project to their startup’s most important products in
> production.

> This is just the beginning of your development, and we’ll have many more
> features to announce in the coming months. For now, you are solid, stable,
> and ready to use.

> You are fast and easy to install on popular clouds with our graphical
> installer or on your local machine with Vagrant. Try it today and see how
> far we’ve come.

~~~
zo7
I'm just glad that they think I'm stable!

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josegonzalez
As one of the Dokku maintainers, I'd like to congratulate the flynn developers
on a 1.0 release. Getting everything polished to a state where you can say
"this is stable" is really hard, and they've done a fine job with Flynn.

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danielsiders
Flynn (YC S14) founders here. Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
PT_2014
Congrats on 1.0 - how does Flynn compare to say BOSH (see BOSH.io)?

~~~
igor_filippov
Also, what's the difference to dokku or deis?

~~~
Titanous
Both Dokku and Deis focus on stateless webapps.

Dokku is explicitly single-host. Flynn can run in a single-host configuration
but typically deployed in a highly available configuration with three or more
hosts.

Flynn is designed to tackle some much bigger problems and supports running and
managing highly available databases inside the platform out of the box in
addition to stateless web apps.

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matt2000
I've used flynn on a couple smaller projects and overall had a good time with
it. Has anyone used it for any larger projects and wouldn't mind sharing their
experiences? I'd be interested to see how it goes once more moving parts get
involved.

~~~
quentez
We've been using it with a ~10 nodes cluster for some time to host both
internal and production apps.

It has allowed the rest of the team to focus on the apps themselves without
worrying about how to deploy them, how to provision more capacity, how to
rollback in case of failure, etc.

Using the builtin affinity and priority system, we were able to make sure that
production apps would always run smoothly without being affected by our other
processes.

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gabrielcsapo
This image got me to love and try this out
([https://flynn.io/images/popsicle-273f37c4.png](https://flynn.io/images/popsicle-273f37c4.png))

~~~
ryanmarsh
Yes! It made me feel like "these folks get it". Or maybe I'm succumbing to the
old advertising axiom (and I'm paraphrasing here):

"If you can explain the problem better than the customer, they'll believe you
also have the solution."

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pauldix
Congrats Daniel and team! Awesome work!

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Titanous
Thanks Paul!

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drchiu
I evaluated flynn (an earlier release) previously and noticed issues when one
of the servers in the cluster went offline suddenly. The stack couldn't fix
itself and along with it the DB was gone as well.

There was a Github issue before about, but I don't have that link around.

Could someone from the dev team at flynn comment about how flynn self heals
currently if there's a server issue? eg. especially the one where the DB is
hosted

Thanks and congrats!

~~~
Titanous
Flynn is designed to be self-healing, if a server goes offline it will recover
immediately and automatically and no confirmed writes will be dropped.

We use a combination of Raft for service discovery and leader election, along
with multiple instances of all core services so host failures within the
quorum tolerance should not impact availability. The design of the data
appliances is carefully considered, you can read an overview here:
[https://flynn.io/docs/databases](https://flynn.io/docs/databases)

If something catastrophic does go wrong, like the power going off in the
datacenter, there is code that can resurrect the cluster when enough hosts
come back online.

We did have some issues with recovery that have been fixed over the past few
months, I'm almost certain the issue that you ran into has been fixed. Data is
never destroyed by Flynn, so it's possible to recover the database from disk
even if Flynn isn't running.

The system is also designed to tolerate partial failures gracefully, so if for
example service discovery fails, the router will fall back to a cache and HTTP
clients should not notice that anything is wrong.

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hello_there
I would really like to see an article comparing Flynn with Deis. Last time I
looked it seemed to me like two different implementations of the same thing.
What are the differences?

~~~
Titanous
Obviously I'm biased, but here's my take:

Flynn has a larger technical scope, covering everything from the details of
how container are run all the way up to the user interface used to deploy
applications. We also run highly available databases within the platform, in
addition to stateless webapps. As a result of working to build an easy to use
unified solution, we've ended up building many components from scratch
specifically for Flynn and have very few dependencies.

Deis is designed to use commonly used off the shelf components, and has a
focus on stateless web apps. Currently Deis is built around the Kubernetes and
Docker ecosystems.

Flynn's approach has given us more flexibility, but it has taken longer, so
Deis has often reached various milestones faster.

It's a frequently asked question so hopefully in the future a well-informed
user with experience on both platforms can write a detailed
teardown/comparison.

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ing33k
are there any startups / companies using Flynn in production ?

~~~
danielsiders
Absolutely. We're putting together a list right now, we just don't have
permission from everyone to talk about it publicly yet. Hopefully we'll have
quotes and case studies to post on the website soon.

