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An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

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Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#51

Post by bglusman »

Titanous wrote: post #46
bglusman wrote: post #20

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…

I'd love to hear about any trouble you ran into while trying Flynn so that we can fix it! Feel free to send me an email: jonathan@flynn.io Convox is a great pick if you want to use AWS-specific services for your entire stack. Instead of using portable open source components, Convox uses AWS services wherever possible, and acts as a lightweight coordinator to combine them into a platform. Flynn has no external depende…

Yeah, definitely think you guys are both top notch projects, but the article focused on you guys as the end solution and mentioned so many other things en route, I felt people should see one of the other high profile contenders, though forgot to add it was AWS only (added below). It's been a few months now since I kind of timeboxed an hour or two to play with each of 3 I narrowed down to as most likely to offer the easiest transition off of Heroku without being single node like Dokku (you guys, Convox and Tsuru were the 3 I think I tried, and got furthest with and was most impressed with Convox and Flynn). It wasn't a totally fair comparison, as I think I ran Flynn and Tsuru locally via Vagrant, because I could for both I think, but had to actually use real AWS for Convox... but this was all just because I was hoping to make a case at work that we should try one of these actual PaaS-like solutions rather than go for a non-PaaS solution like Kubernetes, as I knew it would not be a trivial transition, as the articles' author discovered. If I ever have time to try it again I'll try and go a little further and provide feedback if I have any!

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#52

Post by Titanous »

ukd1 wrote: post #34

Why not just use Heroku and actually build your product?

If Heroku works for you, that's fine, but for lots of people it doesn't. For example, Heroku only supports HTTP, not TCP. There are a number of technical limitations Heroku places on apps that other platforms like Flynn don't.

There are lots of reasons why users need a different, or especially an open source, PaaS.

Some users run into scaling problems when their products grow beyond a certain point. Others want to have more control over their infrastructure for compliance, governance, or other administrative reasons. Others have huge deployments and want to save money by using their own cloud accounts.

It varies from customer to customer, but for many Heroku isn't an option or isn't the best option.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#53

Post by Titanous »

bglusman wrote: post #51
Titanous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear about any trouble you ran into while trying Flynn so that we can fix it! Feel free to send me an email: jonathan@flynn.io Convox is a great pick if you want to use AWS-specific services for your entire stack. Instead of using portable open source components, Convox uses AWS services wherever possible, and acts as a lightweight coordinator to combine them into a platform. Flynn has no external depende…

Yeah, definitely think you guys are both top notch projects, but the article focused on you guys as the end solution and mentioned so many other things en route, I felt people should see one of the other high profile contenders, though forgot to add it was AWS only (added below). It's been a few months now since I kind of timeboxed an hour or two to play with each of 3 I narrowed down to as most likely to offer the e…

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#54

Post by dabeeeenster »

Is there a way to dynamically auto-scale hosts? One of my app has very bursty traffic, and would require scaling from 2 to 10 host servers and then back down over a period of several hours. I can't see this referenced in the docs? I can see you can scale processes but that's not increasing host resources available, right?

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#55

Post by andybak »

ryanSrich wrote: post #25
zachwill wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've had success going from heroku to Dokku on DO. Pricing is pretty much the same and Heroku has mature features so I may switch back at some point.

Are you saying Heroku costs are the same as Dokku on DO? How so?

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#56

Post by Titanous »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #54

Is there a way to dynamically auto-scale hosts? One of my app has very bursty traffic, and would require scaling from 2 to 10 host servers and then back down over a period of several hours. I can't see this referenced in the docs? I can see you can scale processes but that's not increasing host resources available, right?

Flynn itself doesn't communicate with infrastructure APIs currently, but you could hook this up so that there is a base set of three servers that are always running and then an autoscaling group that watched your metrics or a schedule and added/removed servers.

I'd be happy to explain this more on IRC if you're interested (#flynn on Freenode).

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#57

Post by agency »

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…

> so I guess I get to do that this weekend

Why not wait until you encounter a problem that Flynn solves and Dokku doesn't?

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#58

Post by twic »

Titanous wrote: post #13
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,…

Good luck with the out-of-memory handling. From personal experience, that's easier said than done.

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#59

Post by Titanous »

twic wrote: post #58
Titanous wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Good luck with the out-of-memory handling. From personal experience, that's easier said than done.

Here's the issue tracking this: https://github.com/flynn/flynn/issues/3375

Re: An Open Source, Self-Hosted Heroku

#60

Post by dawnerd »

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 was on dokku pretty much from the start but my side projects grew to a point where I needed a little more control so I switched to docker with compose files. Dokku is really nice though - they did a great job making deploying as easy as possible.
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