Shameless plug:

In search of folks who'd like early access to my open-source Heroku-esque PaaS: ShipBuilder

ShipBuilder is a freely available open-source project which aims to make it fast and easy to deploy arbitrary web-applications. Get total control over all aspects of your staging and production environments.

More info: http://shipbuilder.io/

It uses Go, Git, LXC, and HAProxy.

Just reply below with your github username, or shoot an email to jay@jaytaylor.com if you are interested in early access.

Have you considered merging efforts with Flynn?

I'm certainly open to the possibility, I want to end up with the best possible open-source PaaS system.

Me too (not affiliated with Flynn). One of the reasons Rails gained so much mind share (IMO) over the Python ecosystem was fragmentation in Python's ecosystem.

In this case, the way to avoid fragmentation is not to merge but to standardize on the Docker APIs, just like Flynn does.

Docker's job is to guarantee interop between PaaS-like components, so that you don't need to lock yourself into a single monolithic PaaS. Everything you build on Docker will benefit Flynn - and Deis, and Dokku, and Maestro, and dockermix, and custom platforms at Ebay, Uber, Cloudflare, Mailgun etc.

Are you doing anything clever to add and remove upstream hosts from the HAProxy instance?

When I looked into it (very briefly) there was no kind of programmatic access to do that, among other things.

HAProxy does have the ability to gracefully reload a config file, which is what I use in a similar situation.

I think (but might be wrong) that the old process stops listening for new connections, and shuts down when all of its current connections die.

Thanks to the folks at AppFog/CenturyLink for putting us over the top!

Those guys are awesome. Much better than Heroku IMO.

I've had all sorts of issues with them, though. Two times apps have out-and-out disappeared from my control panel and from the web, only to mysteriously return later. Both times the apps involved were hosted on their HP infrastructure, so that might be the source of the problem--apps in the AWS infrastructure didn't go through the same issue.

Their logging could also use some work. Since setting up some monitoring I've discovered that a few of my apps hosted there will sometimes die and/or restart after running for a while. Unfortunately, the "crash log" feature doesn't seem to work properly--the logs are always blanked out--and as such I'm unable to get to the root of the issue. Availability can be dodgy; right now I have a watcher process that monitors for app failures and restarts any it sees down.

Their free plan is unbeatable, though. Up to 2GB RAM with 10 bound services (redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc). So, my experience has been mixed. I really, really want to love them, but unfortunately I keep running into problems.

What's happening with Dokku since Flynn is also going to be open source? My understanding is Flynn is based on Dokku... since Jeff Lindsay is involved.

Flynn lives! (A Tron reference).

Please don't. It hurts too much to be reminded that the show has ended :(

I think this a very interesting way of funding an open-source project, and I'm glad it worked out. Excited to see how Flynn turns out!

Ubuntu Edge is also getting on the corporate sponsor train, but unfortunately I think they set the bar a bit too high.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge

$80K enterprise bundle. It's a bit pricey (even though you get 100 devices), and I'm sure if they offered an $8K option for 10 devices then they'd get a lot more interest than none at all.

The $8K price point is almost in splurge territory, and the benefit of having access to workshops and online support would certainly put it over the top.

How is Flynn planning to handle longer lived services such as databases? Do I run the database separate and just use Flynn for app servers?

Flynn is intended to manage and containerize backing services as well. We'll have a system for specifying hosts and volumes that can be used for persistent storage. In the future we also want to add hooks for provisioning, high availability, and more.

How is orchestration handled?

Orchestration of containers is the purpose of Flynn. We'll create detailed architectural documents in the coming weeks.

Flynn apps are docker containers under the hood, so any docker container can be used to extend your Flynn deployment - including databases and pretty much any long-lived service you can think of. Take a look for http://index.docker.io for examples.

Whew, that's awesome =).

I was watching it lately - and it seemed to be hovering around 91% for some time...

Looking forward to seeing great things from the project.

Good news guys. I posted links to the pledge drive from a few places (HN included), hope it helped. Looking forward to the code!

wp.