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Flynn: first preview release

flynn.io

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Re: Flynn: first preview release

#21

Post by notdonspaulding »

ghayes wrote: post #17
akhatri_aus wrote: post #11

I've been waiting ages for flynn its an awesome project. I used Dokku and its lovely & its so simple. Is there a way to install it manually on a server with stuff already on it? Also is the source of the aws flynn.cupcake.io tool on github, it would be nice to see whats being installed onto an aws cluster.

On that note, it would be great to know what AWS `User Policy` Flynn needs / expects so I could grant it a unique IAM key with limited access for creating servers, etc.

FWIW, the default PowerUser role that can be assigned to an IAM account was sufficient for my tests. I don't know if it could have worked with fewer permissions.

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#22

Post by thu »

danielsiders wrote: post #15
cheez wrote: post #14

How do people build up the experience + the time to develop this kind of thing?

We actually did a crowdfunding campaign[1] last summer to pay for the development time. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058662

Actually after Jeff Lindsay latest blog post[0] I thought that the project was put on the back burner. What is the relationship between cupcake and the initial author(s) ?

[0]: http://progrium.com/blog/2014/02/06/the-start-of-the-age-of-...

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#23

Post by dominotw »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #20
dominotw wrote: post #19

Could someone point out to me (non superficial) differences between various service discovery projects that have popped up recently like, [1]. etcd [2] skydock [3] consul [4] zookeper ( ok this is not new) [5] flynn They all seem to be doing the exact same to me. 1. https://github.com/coreos/etcd 2. https://github.com/crosbymichael/skydock 3. https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/ 5. https://flynn.io/ Edit: flynn uses…

Flynn isn't a service discovery library by itself. It's more of a self hosted Heroku. Though, it does use etcd for service discovery.

Are you sure flynn uses etcd for service discovery instead of its own[1]? Looks like it uses Google Omega instead of RAFT which etcd uses. https://github.com/flynn/discoverd

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#24

Post by Titanous »

ghayes wrote: post #17
akhatri_aus wrote: post #11

I've been waiting ages for flynn its an awesome project. I used Dokku and its lovely & its so simple. Is there a way to install it manually on a server with stuff already on it? Also is the source of the aws flynn.cupcake.io tool on github, it would be nice to see whats being installed onto an aws cluster.

On that note, it would be great to know what AWS `User Policy` Flynn needs / expects so I could grant it a unique IAM key with limited access for creating servers, etc.

We haven't nailed down the exact API calls that we're going to need long-term so there isn't a policy we're recommending. Currently EC2 and Route53 full access will work, but we recommend creating a new AWS account for security reasons if you have anything else running.

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#25

Post by andrewmunsell »

dominotw wrote: post #23
andrewmunsell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flynn isn't a service discovery library by itself. It's more of a self hosted Heroku. Though, it does use etcd for service discovery.

Are you sure flynn uses etcd for service discovery instead of its own[1]? Looks like it uses Google Omega instead of RAFT which etcd uses. https://github.com/flynn/discoverd

You can read more about service discovery on the Flynn site: https://flynn.io/docs/architecture#service-discovery

discoverd is an API on top of another system. Right now, Flynn uses discoverd backed by etcd, though they indicate that this could be replaced with Zookeeper, etc. due to the mdoular design.

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#26

Post by StavrosK »

Are these sorts of services good enough? I want somewhere to deploy my Django apps, ideally I should be able to get a beefy server and deploy every app as a single thing on that server, completely compartmentalized.

The problem I keep hitting is that these things have a tradeoff between ease of use and power. I want to use Docker, but it has no easy way to say "take this file that contains instructions and make everything". You can write Dockerfiles, but you can only use one part of the stack in them, otherwise you run into trouble.

I'm hoping Flynn will allow me to use a database, Redis, uwsgi, nginx, etc with a simple deployment command. Does anyone know of anything else like this?

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#27

Post by thu »

dominotw wrote: post #23
andrewmunsell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flynn isn't a service discovery library by itself. It's more of a self hosted Heroku. Though, it does use etcd for service discovery.

Are you sure flynn uses etcd for service discovery instead of its own[1]? Looks like it uses Google Omega instead of RAFT which etcd uses. https://github.com/flynn/discoverd

Very first line of discoverd's README:

    It's currently backed by etcd[...]

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#28

Post by danielsiders »

akhatri_aus wrote: post #11

I've been waiting ages for flynn its an awesome project. I used Dokku and its lovely & its so simple. Is there a way to install it manually on a server with stuff already on it? Also is the source of the aws flynn.cupcake.io tool on github, it would be nice to see whats being installed onto an aws cluster.

Running it on your own server: We're currently only providing step by step instructions for vagrant, but you should be able to use the script in the vagrant file on your own host with some modifications on your own hardware. Happy to help in IRC (#flynn on freenode)

Flynn Dashboard: At least some part of this will end up as open source in the not distant future, we're trying to figure out the best strategy for additional tools like the dashboard and what parts should be packaged.

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#29

Post by bigonlogn »

dpritchett wrote: post #13
Titanous wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are currently no tutorial-style instructions for using anything but Vagrant, but you should be able to just to run these commands in whatever environment you are using: https://github.com/flynn/flynn-demo/blob/26fcd98cd7646199513...

PSA to anyone trying this on Ubuntu 14: the docker command seems to be "docker.io" now.

FYI, the "docker.io" repository in trusty points to an older version of docker (0.9.1). I believe the script at http://get.docker.io/ubuntu will install the latest version of docker.

Re: Flynn: first preview release

#30

Post by nemothekid »

dominotw wrote: post #19

Could someone point out to me (non superficial) differences between various service discovery projects that have popped up recently like, [1]. etcd [2] skydock [3] consul [4] zookeper ( ok this is not new) [5] flynn They all seem to be doing the exact same to me. 1. https://github.com/coreos/etcd 2. https://github.com/crosbymichael/skydock 3. https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/ 5. https://flynn.io/ Edit: flynn uses…

Etcd and Zookeeper provide essentially the same functionality. They are both a strongly consistent key/value stores that support notifications to clients of changes. These two projects are limited to service discovery, there are a number of projects that depend on zookeeper (that theoretically could be ported to etcd) for various distributed state management such as Kafka, Storm, and Hadoop.

Skydock (Skydns) and Consul provide automagic service discovery primarily through dns. They use a strongly consistent backend (think Zookeeper or Etcd), to keep track of what servers are active and what applications they run. They then expose a DNS that routes through said servers. So lets say you had a client application that would talk to a node application that could be on any number of servers. What you could do is hard code that list into your application and randomly select one, in order to "fake" load balancing. However every time a machine went up or down you would have to update that list. What Consul provides is you just tell your app to connect to "mynodeapp.consul" and then consul will give you the proper address of one of your node apps.

Consul and Skydock are both applications that build on top of a tool like Zookeeper and Etcd. [1]

Finally all these tools, you can essentially consider "ops" tools to manage the lifetime of application, services and servers "in the cloud". What a developer ideally wants to do is just push code and not have to worry about what servers are running what, and worry about failover and the like. What Flynn provides (if I get it), is a diy Heroku like platform that makes use of tools like Etcd, Skydns, Docker(?) and others. With Flynn, I believe the goal is to radically simplify ops. Another project that I believe may be similar to Flynn is Apache Mesos.

[1] Technically Consul and Skydock, IIRC don't actually use Etcd or Zookeeper, but both implement an underlying protocol to achieve the same thing - Raft, but they could use Etcd or Zookeeper instead of implementing the protocol themselves.

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