
Show HN: A new container platform with builds, provisioning, networking and apps - tobbyb
https://www.flockport.com/
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asdkhadsj
Looks good - not a knock, but for me I'd like comparisons to see how it does
against the existing orchestrators/schedulers. Or at the very least, where it
differentiates itself against them. Because choosing a new scheduler over more
established ones is quite a risk, imo. I feel you have to sell why we'd take a
risk with an unknown _(to me)_ product.

Currently I feel like the site does a great job selling that Flockport has a
lot of the fundamentals, in an easy to use package. Great. But I still want
more info.

So in concrete terms as an example, how do you differentiate yourself when
compared to Nomad?

 _edit: sorry to be typical overly negative HN commentator - I don 't mean to
be, I'm just seeking information, and feel the site is a bit lacking to
describe that. I appreciate your hard work here :)_

 _edit2_ : Something I love for new software is when they do comparisons, like
this:
[https://www.nomadproject.io/intro/vs/index.html](https://www.nomadproject.io/intro/vs/index.html)

~~~
tobbyb
Thanks for the feedback. This is far from negative. There is definitely value
in comparative docs that lets users get a quick overview, and we will put one
together.

However we also want to start new conversations in the community about
containers and orchestration and reach users who find existing platforms too
complex. And we have put together a lot of content to kindle these
discussions.

More technical scrutiny could lead to simplification and lower barriers for
both users and developers.

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tobbyb
We are pleased to preview Flockport with the HN community. Flockport is a new
container management platform designed to deliver a lot of functionality and
ease of use. We designed this to be simple, it was the core driving force and
we hope we have succeeded.

Flockport lets you quickly provision servers and deploy and manage containers
across servers, supports overlay networks, distributed storage, service
discovery, load balancers and high availability.

Flockport also provides a container build system and an app store. Apps can be
deployed cluster wide. We also built in support for rolling out things like
databases across clusters. Users can add and remove both database instances
and also individual databases cluster wide. There is also similar support for
web servers and load balancers builtin.

We are eager to have the community give it a go and get their early feedback
and support. For those who do not want to install it there are preinstalled
VMs on the downloads page and also screencasts on the resources page.

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indigodaddy
Hasn't Flockport been around for quite awhile I thought?

~~~
tobbyb
Glad to hear you are aware of Flockport. Flockport was initially conceived as
an app store for LXC containers. This was still in the early days of
containers when the awareness was just building.

We always wanted to do more and our early vision was for a container
management platform that is more accessible and easier to use and now of
course we have built out a whole platform that delivers a lot more
functionality and capabilities, and hopefully delivers on some of that early
vision.

