[HN Gopher] RIP Flynn.io ___________________________________________________________________ RIP Flynn.io Author : corobo Score : 147 points Date : 2021-02-28 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | hiharryhere wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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? | neom wrote: | 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 | jpgvm wrote: | 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 wrote: | I don't see ECS going anywhere. AWS still maintains old | services like SimpleDB and ECS development seems to be speeding | up if anything. | dig1 wrote: | 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/ | | [2] https://deislabs.io/ | | [3] https://rancher.com/ | | [4] | https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bgpw5w/flynn_vs_dok... | imdsm wrote: | Dokku, Deis, Rancher, and finally Flynn. Another one falls. | I've been around all these projects and small scale docker PaaS | for almost a decade, and k8s has just killed them off, which is | so sad. As you say, you don't always want to use k8s for a | small three machine setup. I guess it was always going to | happen, after containers stopped feeling cool, people stopped | working on projects for them. | josegonzalez wrote: | Re: Dokku, reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated. | | We're still chugging along, and have recently added Cloud | Native Buildpacks support[1], as well as integrations with | Kubernetes[2] and Nomad[3]. Happy to hear where you found out | that development on the project was halted, given that I made | a release yesterday[4]... [1]: | https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/methods/cloud-native- | buildpacks/ [2]: https://github.com/dokku/dokku- | scheduler-kubernetes [3]: | https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-nomad [4]: | https://github.com/dokku/dokku/releases/tag/v0.23.9 | arcturus17 wrote: | > Dokku, Deis, Rancher, and finally Flynn. Another one falls. | | Isn't Dokku alive and well? I don't use it but I read about | it in some related research recently, and some people on this | thread report to be happy users. | stefan_ wrote: | It works perfectly fine, chugging along nicely. This whole | thread confuses me; the whole point of Dokku is that _it | isn 't k8s_. | | It's not like you were gonna deploy Dokku at $BigCorp, no | Kubernetes is a huge selling point for anything I'm gonna | use in my free time. | JMTQp8lwXL wrote: | Slightly off topic, but when is 'big enough' for k8s to make | sense? Is dozens of eng teams plus 50+ microservices make | sense? | | For a company that is a single eng team, it's obvious. But | progressively larger organizations, it seems like a gray zone. | jordanthoms wrote: | I moved us from Heroku to GKE a few years ago when we had ~4 | engineers - Took a bit to get things figured out and get CI | deploys etc working well, but it really wasn't all that | complicated. | | Honestly baffled at how many people are convinced you need | hundreds of engineers before k8s can work well - they must be | doing something very different from what we are. We did keep | databases out of k8s (until recently when we added | CockroachDB running inside the cluster) and only had ~6 | services to move which may have kept things simpler. We're | now scaling to run thousands of vcpu at peak times and a | dozen different services, and it's still not all that hard to | manage. | | Can somebody who has had the opposite experience comment on | what actually made it so difficult to implement? I imagine | that if you are managing the cluster control plane yourself | that will make things much more difficult - but unless you | have some very specific requirement you can use a hosted k8s | to reduce that. | arcticfox wrote: | > For a company that is a single eng team, it's obvious. | | I'm not sure I get this. Are you saying that it obviously | does or doesn't make sense? | | My team is _three people_ and k8s makes our lives easier than | any alternatives I 'm aware of. We used to be on Heroku, | which is cool, until you need to do run anything other than a | monolith or more secure than all publicly-accessible | services. | IgorPartola wrote: | It's not dependent on size but what you do. If you run a mono | stack you initially spend less time on devops than when you | run microservices. Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise | hasn't done a Heroku deploy lately. When your engineers spend | enough time on devops to impact productivity is when you | reach for a different solution. I can only see one other | reason to start with microservices: you are developing | something with much higher than usual security requirements | and need an "air gap" between pieces of your system. Like if | you store raw credit card numbers and want to separate their | storage mechanism from the res rig the system with a really | tightly controlled API. | | Even so, K8 is a solution where running containers on a | container as a service system is prohibitively expensive. The | newfangled systems aren't free in terms of operating costs | and would you rather pay for extra hardware or for | engineering time, knowing that hardware doesn't take | vacations or leave your company for a better job? | kostarelo wrote: | > It's not dependent on size but what you do | | It is dependent on size. You could for example start with | an engineering team working on a mono stack and outsource | data and analytics operations. But at some point, you will | decide that data and analytics have to be in-house. You | start with a mono stack for each of them. But then you | suddenly start splitting each of these three into sub- | teams. Suddenly mono stack doesn't make all that sense. | | K8s solves the problem of horizontal scaling in both teams | and infrastructure. It's inevitable when (and only if) you | plan on scaling up. Not that all teams/companies will/want | to follow that path. | chucky_z wrote: | I'd take the alternate view. K8s is a huge relief from both | development and operations, but it absolutely _requires_ an | entire team of dedicated folks along with re-tooling | everything to fit it 's paradigm. This is true of all | orchestration systems, but _especially_ true for k8s. If you | have a dozen eng teams and 50 microservices, and 2 or 3 | devops /SRE people because it's all in AWS/GCP/Azure, k8s is | going to crash and burn. If you have a dozen eng teams with | 2+ devops/SRE folks in each of them, and a handful of extra | folks to form a whole new team for K8s you're in great shape. | JMTQp8lwXL wrote: | We have multiple data centers and a similarly sized devops | team (separate from SRE). They're exceptionally skilled and | lord I pray they'll make it, because I know it won't be an | easy journey. | | None of our teams have dedicated devops engineers. Teams | just have engineers that do everything: back end, front | end, deployments, monitoring dashboards. Teams write run | books for SRE. Dev Ops supplies eng teams tooling for | deployments. | | I've argued many, many times we spread our engineers too | thin and we need greater specialization for better | outcomes. We have enough engineers, but the problem is | everyone owns their own thin but very tall vertical slice | of the total system. | dilyevsky wrote: | We have 3 infra eng + manager for over a dozen devs and a | bunch of services deployed on k8s (including all DBs). K8s | itself is self managed (nothing is hosted) and has been the | least of our concerns operations-wise. | IgorPartola wrote: | 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. | babaganoosh89 wrote: | Caprover is also nice, you use docker files instead of heroku | build packs and it has a nice gui. | conradfr wrote: | 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. | csnweb wrote: | May be it's less about kubernetes then about the market itself? | If I don't want do any ops I also don't want to maintain a | server and keep that safe, so I would go for Heroku instead of | running that myself. And if you need more there are also | managed k8s offerings which seem to be working fine for many | small teams as well. For us it's basically a cheaper version of | Heroku with a little bit more effort. We are actually using | small managed k8s clusters from Digitalocean since nearly a | year now and had zero issues with it so far. I really like not | having to take care of the servers. | dedene wrote: | Is there a good maintained alternative? | jrnkntl wrote: | I'm happily using Dokku[1] and another one in this host your | own PaaS space is CapRover[2] | | [1] https://dokku.com/ | | [2] https://caprover.com | boramalper wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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), or even | provide feedback in the Discussions section of the primary | Github repository | (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions). | LogicX wrote: | 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. | kevinob11 wrote: | @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! | tebbers wrote: | Dokku is FANTASTIC, thank you so much for your work on | it. | simplify wrote: | I can second caprover. Personally I find it easier to use | than dokku. The admin ui is quite nice. | josegonzalez wrote: | 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), or even provide feedback in the | Discussions section of the primary Github repository | (https://github.com/dokku/dokku/discussions). | | (I am the dokku maintainer). | faizshah wrote: | Kind of related: is there something like Dokku but for FaaS? | krts- wrote: | There's faasd [https://github.com/openfaas/faasd] which is | OpenFaaS without the Kubernetes overhead. | geerlingguy wrote: | And alexellis is a pretty active maintainer. | woudsma wrote: | 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 or https://github.com/swarmlet/swarmlet | rdli wrote: | 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. | qbasic_forever wrote: | CapRover is a nice Docker-based PaaS you can run yourself: | https://caprover.com/ | _kst_ wrote: | 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/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 | | 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. | Aeolun wrote: | Wonder if anyone will take this up now, since its BSD licensed | and all. | | Guess it'd have to have a different name though. | jabo wrote: | 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? | breakingcups wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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, but rather, | community participation [1]. It could have likely helped had | Flynn been donated to a Foundation like the Cloud Native | Foundation (assuming they are open to incubating such | projects)? | | 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...? That might 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/E... | | [1] https://medium.com/runacapital/open-source-growth- | benchmarks... | smashah wrote: | I am also extremely interested as to why this stopped being | maintained. | jpgvm wrote: | 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. | ponyous wrote: | 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. | postit wrote: | 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 wrote: | I have the feeling that nobody is making (or trying to make) | any money on Nomad? Their cash cow must be terraform. | zimpenfish wrote: | 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! | endisneigh wrote: | What ever happened to Docker swarm? Considering how popular | Docker (still) is, I'm surprised it's not solidly #2 behind K8s. | mintplant wrote: | The Docker company gave up on all that and switched to selling | "developer tools". | [deleted] | dhosek wrote: | 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. | maximilianroos wrote: | Readme from before the change: | https://github.com/flynn/flynn/blob/2c20757de8b32a40ba06f7e5... | imdsm wrote: | That's fair, but I guess the people who will feel sad about | this are the ones who know what it is/was. I remember back when | it was being developed, along with Deis and later, Rancher. But | the shadow of Kubernetes has caused them all to wither. :( | [deleted] | sytse wrote: | 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 wrote: | Go with Nomad then | walski wrote: | 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/ | | (Not that the page had changed in any meaningful way in pretty | much forever) | riffic wrote: | seriously the lack of context surrounding these sort of posts | is lazy and awful. | corobo wrote: | 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 | macintux wrote: | Sometimes people will post a quick comment after submitting | a link indicating why they submitted it. | corobo wrote: | Aye and if they do that too soon you're back at no | upvotes while people decide if you're farming karma or | not | | In any case I got distracted and forgot about it till I | saw it on the homepage | einpoklum wrote: | I wonder about that... why can't you submit a couple of | sentences of context with your URL? Even a single sentence | would be better than the nothing we have now, where you | need to guess what the URL is about. | corobo wrote: | I had no idea it wasn't possible either until submitting | this, I just thought everyone was being lazy and assuming | knowledge of a product as the person I responded to did | with me haha | oap_bram wrote: | 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 now for this purpose. It's not self-hosted, | but it does the job for me :) | jimaek wrote: | Consider checking 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 | ornornor wrote: | > I use https://fly.io now for this purpose. | | That looks pretty cool, thanks. | evoxmusic wrote: | Qovery is partially open source and have a 100% free plan for | individual developers. https://www.qovery.com ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-28 23:00 UTC)