
Stable release of Flynn – open-source container deployment - gregwebs
https://flynn.io/blog/flynn-stable-meetup
======
Titanous
Flynn CTO here, happy to answer any questions about Flynn. This is the first
release in our stable channel with an update path, we'll be releasing weekly
from now on.

It may not be "production ready" for everyone, though please try it out and
let us know how it goes.

If you're in SF, please come to our meetup in Tuesday and we can talk in
person: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/flynn-stable-sf-meetup-
tickets-...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/flynn-stable-sf-meetup-
tickets-19406472281)

~~~
vishvananda
I noticed you removed etcd recently in favor of running raft internally. I
have a couple of questions:

1) Why did you remove etcd? 2) Why use the hashicorp raft implementation[1]
over the coreos raft implementation[2]?

[1] [https://github.com/hashicorp/raft](https://github.com/hashicorp/raft) [2]
[https://github.com/coreos/etcd/tree/master/raft](https://github.com/coreos/etcd/tree/master/raft)

~~~
Titanous
We didn't really need all the features of etcd, this change is part of a
longer term plan to only use Raft for leader election and service metadata
with service instances propagated using cluster gossip. We also ran into some
issues with etcd that were very hard to diagnose, and the developer who worked
on the project was familiar with and confident in the Hashicorp package.

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drchiu
@Titanous, fantastic project.

Could you elaborate what differentiates Flynn from something like Tutum?

~~~
Titanous
Thanks! Tutum is a proprietary SaaS product that provides a web UI for Docker.
Flynn is a full-featured open source platform, you don't need to think about
containers, just your app.

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phantom_oracle
1) Is this tool the same as Docker Swarm?

2) Has the code been security-audited?

3) Can I use this as a combination of Puppet/Chef + Swarm?

Lastly, who is this tool for? The guy running his 1 VPS or the startup running
their 50 AWS medium instances?

~~~
Titanous
> 1) Is this tool the same as Docker Swarm?

No, it is much higher level. You could think of it as open source Heroku, apps
are deployed using buildpacks and a PostgreSQL cluster is included.

> 2) Has the code been security-audited?

Not yet. We've been focusing on stability, work on internal security will be
starting soon. You can expose ports 80/443 to the Internet, but shouldn't run
untrusted code on it. See here for more details:
[https://flynn.io/docs/security](https://flynn.io/docs/security)

> 3) Can I use this as a combination of Puppet/Chef + Swarm?

For most use cases it would replace those tools.

> Lastly, who is this tool for? The guy running his 1 VPS or the startup
> running their 50 AWS medium instances?

All of the above, though we recommend at least three instances for high
availability and haven't tested large clusters yet.

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e12e
From the manual install section, there's a note about initializing the
cluster, along with a reference to:

[https://discovery.flynn.io/clusters/53e8402e-030f-4861-95ba-...](https://discovery.flynn.io/clusters/53e8402e-030f-4861-95ba-d5b5a91b5902)

Does this mean one has to jump through hoops to install flynn on a set of
devices that are networked to each other, but cut off from the Internet?

~~~
Titanous
You can specify the host IPs explicitly instead of using the discovery
service. The current snag for isolated clusters is that stock buildpacks
require internet access to download languages and frameworks. We'll solve
this, but some additional work is necessary.

~~~
drchiu
Am I correct to assume this will break the discovery service if we override
with host IPs?

~~~
Titanous
The discovery URL is only used for bootstrapping, nothing will break if you
specify IPs instead. They are interchangeable.

