Flynn (YC S14) founders here. Happy to answer any questions.
Unfortunately we're a small team and frequently travel to events, etc. So it's expensive for us to guarantee that someone will be around. Obviously we'd like to provide support to as many people as possible at the lowest possible rate, so as we have more people paying for support and economies of scale kick in we hope to be able to drop those prices. In the meantime we need to cover our costs or development will stall
edit: our current prices are also based on the level of support that our most active beta users needed. Now that we're past 1.0 hopefully users will need less help which will also help lower prices. We have a very high bar for support quality and don't want to overextend ourselves to the point where we can't deliver
I feel like our current deploy infrastructure doesn't need to be replaced if it means forking over $1500+ a month.
Most current users (from individual developers to large organizations) haven't needed or wanted commercial support contracts. The offering is there for organizations who need significant help and/or an absolute guarantee that they'll be able to reach us at any hour of the day, every day of the year.
To compare with Flynn, their current pricing is $74-75/node, which is quite a bit more. However, Flynn appears to offer more 1 on 1 support whereas Cloud66's is extra.
Nonetheless, there's quite a bit of difference. I think the range of $20/node may be reasonable. Anything less, the company would be unable to grow. In fact, especially for early stage startups, I'd probably err on the side of a higher pricing (eg. $30-40).
The paid plan is not for the side project but for funded projects or ones that already have money coming in.
Flynn is also a whole lot easier to get set up. Again, just what I've observed based on an earlier release.
Dokku is explicitly single-host. Flynn can run in a single-host configuration but typically deployed in a highly available configuration with three or more hosts.
Flynn is designed to tackle some much bigger problems and supports running and managing highly available databases inside the platform out of the box in addition to stateless web apps.
Instead of relying on a lower layer like BOSH, Flynn is self-bootstrapping and self-hosting. It runs everything except the container runner in containers managed by the platform. The same APIs and tools are used to manage user applications and Flynn components.
For more information, check out our Architecture page: https://flynn.io/docs/architecture
You can bring your own lower level infrastructure, like IaaS or bare metal. There is a cloud installer that can spin up a cluster to try out on EC2, Azure, or Digital Ocean, but most production users are using whatever management tools they are comfortable with to deploy and scale Flynn hosts out.
At Pivotal we're seeing multi-thousand VM instances of Cloud Foundry that BOSH deploys and updates gracefully.
We're watching Kubernetes, it's possible that doing that change will make sense at some point in the future.
The front that flynn exposes is pleasently simple, but I also want to know what implies every command and how it affect the running environment.
There is an architecture page: https://flynn.io/docs/architecture
Please let me know if anything specific is missing so that we can add it.
> Can I choose to dedicate a host to run a db, and at the same time run serveral mini-processes without launching every one in a container?
You can dedicate specific hosts to specific apps and process types using node tagging, though it looks like we are missing documentation for that. I'll make sure it gets added soon.
You are free to fork multiple processes inside of containers you deploy, there doesn't need to be a 1:1 mapping of container to process.
Let me know if there is something else specific that you are wondering about and I can answer here or get some more docs up.