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An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

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Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#11

Post by ggrochow »

As someone who's been using flynn in production for a month or two, some things to be aware of. (Devops is not one of my strongpoints, so keep that in mind)

You want to use an external blob-store, by default it uses its own postgres to store them. However, it also doesn't do any garbage collection, so we ran out of HD space on our cluster, causing postgres to go into read-only mode. This prevented us from pushing updates / changing any app-config settings ( ENV, Scaling, etc ). Thankfully we were hosting our own DB off-cluster or that too would have been read only.

The default limits on memory is 1gb, and for our app, when it runs out, it just crashes. Leaving no obvious error messages to be found.

Obviously RTFM as well, (especially this part https://flynn.io/docs/production) we had some other issues that could have easily been prevented.

Huge shout-out to the team that hangs out in their IRC channel, they were a massive help in solving the problems we've came across.

Using it when it works is lovely, we switched off of heroku recently and its been a very similar experience.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#12

Post by zachwill »

mbreedlove wrote: post #7

I just migrated a hobby website to Dokku, which also markets itself as a self-hosted Heroku. I was curious how Flynn compared. Fortunately, there was a blog post giving an overview[1]. I get the impression that Flynn has all the benefits of Dokku, but has the ability to scale to multiple servers. It seems like Flynn is obviously better than Dokku, so I guess I get to do that this weekend. Keeping up with new containe…

I think a lot of us feel your same pain.

Has anyone had success with sticking to Dokku for small side projects on DigitalOcean/Linode/etc?

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#13

Post by Titanous »

ggrochow wrote: post #11

As someone who's been using flynn in production for a month or two, some things to be aware of. (Devops is not one of my strongpoints, so keep that in mind) You want to use an external blob-store, by default it uses its own postgres to store them. However, it also doesn't do any garbage collection, so we ran out of HD space on our cluster, causing postgres to go into read-only mode. This prevented us from pushing upd…

> You want to use an external blob-store, by default it uses its own postgres to store them. However, it also doesn't do any garbage collection

The lack of garbage collection by default will be fixed in next week's stable release, we're really sorry that it caused you pain!

> The default limits on memory is 1gb, and for our app, when it runs out, it just crashes. Leaving no obvious error messages to be found.

Indeed, we're working on documenting this and exposing out-of-memory events in the app logs so that this is obvious.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#14

Post by neokya »

Looks like this is great project.

We are using powerful dedicated server to host multiple sites/apps like the way shared hosting providers do. Maintenance and upgrade is so painful, I am trying to move to something else.

I looked into Docker but seems things are still not stable. Another approach I am looking into is KVM virtualization.

Aactually, all I want is something like Heroku (but self hosted or German providers cause our clients are German and that's important) where we can host each app on it's own container.

So far, this meets all the requirements.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#15

Post by nicksergeant »

zachwill wrote: post #12
mbreedlove wrote: post #7

I just migrated a hobby website to Dokku, which also markets itself as a self-hosted Heroku. I was curious how Flynn compared. Fortunately, there was a blog post giving an overview[1]. I get the impression that Flynn has all the benefits of Dokku, but has the ability to scale to multiple servers. It seems like Flynn is obviously better than Dokku, so I guess I get to do that this weekend. Keeping up with new containe…

I think a lot of us feel your same pain. Has anyone had success with sticking to Dokku for small side projects on DigitalOcean/Linode/etc?

I currently have 16 apps deployed via Dokku on my 8GB Linode and am pretty happy with it. I have a wide variety of apps installed: Node, Django, Rails, and Elixir (Phoenix).

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#16

Post by aclimatt »

neokya wrote: post #14

Looks like this is great project. We are using powerful dedicated server to host multiple sites/apps like the way shared hosting providers do. Maintenance and upgrade is so painful, I am trying to move to something else. I looked into Docker but seems things are still not stable. Another approach I am looking into is KVM virtualization. Aactually, all I want is something like Heroku (but self hosted or German provide…

That's precisely what we wanted, and we tried a lot of different options. Flynn was the answer, definitely worth a try.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#17

Post by SSLy »

mbreedlove wrote: post #7

I just migrated a hobby website to Dokku, which also markets itself as a self-hosted Heroku. I was curious how Flynn compared. Fortunately, there was a blog post giving an overview[1]. I get the impression that Flynn has all the benefits of Dokku, but has the ability to scale to multiple servers. It seems like Flynn is obviously better than Dokku, so I guess I get to do that this weekend. Keeping up with new containe…

only "starting"? When I chat with my dev friends it sounds exactly the same, just swap nouns here and there.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#18

Post by mawalu »

"However, a primary goal of our solution was to automate the process of going from code in a repository to a deployed application in our cluster — much like Heroku. Kubernetes did not appear have any mechanism to support this type of workflow, nor a handful of other features we had hoped to find."

Just in case someone is feeling the same, deis[1] is providing exactly this. I did not try their software but I've read a lot of positive about them in the last time.

[1] https://deis.com/

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#19

Post by bduerst »

Titanous wrote: post #4
xutopia wrote: post #2

TLDR: We tried getting something similar to Heroku up and running but we ended up going with a paid service that starts at 4299$/month.

Hey, I'm a co-founder of Flynn. Flynn is entirely open source and BSD-licensed ( https://github.com/flynn/flynn ). You can run Flynn on any infrastructure without paying us anything. The price you reference is for our Managed Flynn product, where we act as your ops team, operating a Flynn cluster for you and providing hands-on support for your apps and databases in production.

Do you have a comparison chart or something lining Flynn up against Azure/Heroku/Google App Engine somewhere?

I know it's probably not as feature-complete as those other PaaS's, but it would be great to get it at a glance.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#20

Post by bglusman »

This is a great overview of the kubernetes/self-hosted PaaS landscape, but is also clearly a bit of marketing for Flynn. Flynn looks awesome, but also as/more awesome at a glance from my research and test runs is https://github.com/convox/rack which I got closer to working more quickly than Flynn, though it helped that Convox builds on top of docker-compose.yml files, which we were already using for development.

For better or worse, we're going the full kubernetes route though, and still working out what deployment etc looks like. So far a lot of un-DRY looking YAML files have inspired a spike at a tool to help manage creating and maintaining kubernetes yaml[1], which others reading this are welcome to try and I'd love to hear better alternatives to or get feedback/pull requests/etc. I may push up a branch I'm working on later that partially automates creating deployments from a Procfile, but we discovered having seperate Procfiles may make applying env-variable only changes harder, curious to hear if others have any guidelines on that, it's so easy to edit an ENV var on Heroku we took it for granted.

[1] https://github.com/stellaservice/ky

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