faqs

Flockport is designed to make containers and the rich ecosystem of Linux applications and infrastructure more accessible. We are committed to simplicity and ease of use. The current ecosystem is increasingly complex and its easy for users to get lost in setup and configuration. Flockport is a small step towards providing a simpler alternative. This allows users to focus on their apps and ideas without getting bogged down in infrastructure.

Containers separate your applications from the OS. You can move your apps across hosts seamlessly with a simple command. You can also do this with VMs but containers are lightweight, easier to access and manage and move across hosts and avoid lock-in to any hardware or cloud provider.

Flockport chose LXC containers because they behave like light weight VMs, offer a standard OS environment and thus allow the seamless migration of workloads from VMs to containers.

Flockport is a container management platform that currently supports LXC containers. Flockport adds a number of capabilities on top of LXC.

Flockport adds port forwarding and management, volume management, service registration, an App store and an application packaging system to LXC. Flockport also lets you easily deploy and manage containers across servers.

Flockport lets you provision servers and manage containers across servers, adds service discovery, overlay networks, distributed storage and HA.

Flockport also provides an application build system based on LXC containers and an app store. And a standardized way to setup and manage LXC across Linux distributions with out of the box support for volumes, networks and port management.

LXC containers provide a standard OS environment and behave like light weight VMs. This significantly reduces the complexity that comes with platforms that use Docker style single process containers.

Docker uses a different kind of container, a single process container. This is a non standard OS environment and adds technical debt and complexity to containers. Here is a quick guide to help you understand the differences between LXC and Docker containers. Flockport is focussed on the seamless migration of workloads from VMs to containers.

The Flockport App Store hosts the most popular open source applications in containers. To use the apps just download the container, start it and access the app in your browser.

This simplifies things for end users as there is no need to setup applications, install dependencies or configure databases. Even better the containers are self contained and can be moved across servers and cloud providers easily.

The App Store free to use and accessible from the Flockport app. All apps are signed and downloaded securely. App builds are automated with Flockport Recipes.

No, containers are a Linux technology that depend on the Linux kernel. For other platforms you can use Flockbox. Flockbox is a VM instance with Flockport preinstalled. You can chooose from an Ubuntu or Alpine Linux VM. Please visit the Flockbox section on the Downloads page.

Yes, Flockport is committed to open source and is released under the GPL2. The supporting infrastructure including the github repos has not yet been rolled out and will be released progressively as we move forward with the preview.