Show HN: A new container platform with builds, provisioning, networking and apps

Show HN: A new container platform with builds, provisioning, networking and apps(flockport.com)

20 points by tobbyb 7 years ago | 5 comments

asdkhadsj 7 years ago |

Looks good - not a knock, but for me I'd like comparisons to see how it does against the existing orchestrators/schedulers. Or at the very least, where it differentiates itself against them. Because choosing a new scheduler over more established ones is quite a risk, imo. I feel you have to sell why we'd take a risk with an unknown (to me) product.

Currently I feel like the site does a great job selling that Flockport has a lot of the fundamentals, in an easy to use package. Great. But I still want more info.

So in concrete terms as an example, how do you differentiate yourself when compared to Nomad?

edit: sorry to be typical overly negative HN commentator - I don't mean to be, I'm just seeking information, and feel the site is a bit lacking to describe that. I appreciate your hard work here :)

edit2: Something I love for new software is when they do comparisons, like this: https://www.nomadproject.io/intro/vs/index.html

tobbyb 7 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback. This is far from negative. There is definitely value in comparative docs that lets users get a quick overview, and we will put one together.

However we also want to start new conversations in the community about containers and orchestration and reach users who find existing platforms too complex. And we have put together a lot of content to kindle these discussions.

More technical scrutiny could lead to simplification and lower barriers for both users and developers.

tobbyb 7 years ago |

We are pleased to preview Flockport with the HN community. Flockport is a new container management platform designed to deliver a lot of functionality and ease of use. We designed this to be simple, it was the core driving force and we hope we have succeeded.

Flockport lets you quickly provision servers and deploy and manage containers across servers, supports overlay networks, distributed storage, service discovery, load balancers and high availability.

Flockport also provides a container build system and an app store. Apps can be deployed cluster wide. We also built in support for rolling out things like databases across clusters. Users can add and remove both database instances and also individual databases cluster wide. There is also similar support for web servers and load balancers builtin.

We are eager to have the community give it a go and get their early feedback and support. For those who do not want to install it there are preinstalled VMs on the downloads page and also screencasts on the resources page.

indigodaddy 7 years ago |

Hasn't Flockport been around for quite awhile I thought?

tobbyb 7 years ago | |

Glad to hear you are aware of Flockport. Flockport was initially conceived as an app store for LXC containers. This was still in the early days of containers when the awareness was just building.

We always wanted to do more and our early vision was for a container management platform that is more accessible and easier to use and now of course we have built out a whole platform that delivers a lot more functionality and capabilities, and hopefully delivers on some of that early vision.