> AWS has a long standing issue with the ECS agent randomly disconnecting, resulting in orphaned EC2 instances which can cause traffic or deployment degradation.
> We have attempted to solve this a few ways in the past, but there were still critical edge cases falling through.
> So we bit the bullet, and developed a robust, full featured ECS cluster management solution to solve this problem once and for all.
> It's currently in private preview. To get early access before we roll it out to everyone, contact support.
I found elsewhere in the Flight control docs where they recommend ECs+EC2. While I'm not surprised to hear about issues with ECS+EC2, given the reported issues above I don't know if I'd recommend it in my docs. Fargate is a far better option for most use cases, at least in my experience. Unless you need specialized instance types, like GPU workloads.
This could have been some custom cdk constructs. Then at least you can plug in SQS / SNS / DynamoDB / CW / IAM all in one solution. Flightcontrol doesn't seem to offer these.
I’ve been getting great mileage out of service catalog products. They’re a great middle ground between custom CDK and in-house PaaS. You can even use them as CloudFormation resources so they compose well and users are agnostic to which CDK language (or Terraform even!) that is used to write them. I’m currently experimenting with using them to expose terraform modules as CDK constructs.
> Your team gets bogged down with complex Terraform scripts, manual configuration, and endless CI/CD pipelines.
I really hate marketing speak like this. Terraform is there specifically to solve the Aws infrastructure complexity.you create your system once and minor changes if needed.
> Flightcontrol fully automates infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, and deployments. All within your own AWS account where you retain full visibility and control
Why does everyone think this is a desirable thing? Excluding adding to your aws price, you're now vendor locked in for your pipelines also.
I'm not seeing any benefits here for any already established company, maybe a small start-up of fresh graduates who don't want to learn Iac/DevOps ?
Terraform isn't there to resolve the complexity of aws, it's there so you can manage tour aws deploy more easily.
In fact, terraform exposes the complexity of AWS, since with terraform you need to hook everything up manually.
And avoiding vendor lock in is an illusion. Everyone is locked in to some extent. Just design things so you can move providers by understanding your system and architecting it correctly.
Not taking advantage of extra capabilities vendors provide you is just stupid. SQS/lambda is great. Why avoid it, because one day in the far future you might move to GCP? Protip: if you move to GCP (or Oracle cloud, or IBM cloud, or CloudFlare, etc) you're going to rebuild everything anyway.
For larger companies this will get shut down, because the idea of some random team deploying to the cloud by themselves is a security breach that hasn't been reported yet.
I liked Flightcontrol, found it more reliable and less finicky than Cloud Build + Cloud Run, but it was too expensive for me.
They introduced a cheaper plan since I tried it, but it's missing the main feature that I actually think makes FC worth it (preview environments)
I know not everyone wants to get in on the Vercel Cartel model of excessive free-tier generosity made up for by 1000% markups at scale... but $400/month is tough to swallow when you barely need $50/month of compute to handle your production workload.
Nice idea. I work at SP500 corp and we have platform teams provide this. I always wondered if it could be a startup. My reservation with tbis is tbe classic one: not open source. But I totally get why it isn't. Although FOSS might work as the value (at work and here too) is in having someone in a Slack channel that can help if a deploy gets stuck. The code is kind of a terraform-esque of sorts.
I think 'Batteries Included' would interest you, then. Like this, it's installable on AWS. It's a whole platform PaaS + AI + more built on open source. So Kubernetes is at the core, but with tons of automation and UI. Dev environments are Kubernetes in Docker (Kind-based).
In general I love the PaaS experience and I can see the value Flightcontrol can potentially provide to the companies that work mostly with AWS. The free starter plan for individual is tempting to try out Flightcontrol, BTW what is the service limit for free plan? I could not find it.
I am also working on similar tool[1] but it's bit more niche to batch jobs type functionality but not just limited to AWS rather it's cloud agnostic.
It's a shame that "Preview environments" are only available on the business plan @ $397/m. I guess that it makes sense if you're expending $4k+/m on AWS.
Coolify is your best option here. It has preview environments and lots of other built-in features - just the cost of your server if you're savvy enough to get things setup yourself. https://coolify.io/
They do with app runner, but last I checked, for some reason services were capped at low CPU/Memory and didn't allow basic ECS features like attached storage. I think they also had another one... AWS is very fragmented and strange.
They offer two discrete services. One is a simplified AWS where the interface is something like Service Now and you don't have access to the environment to make control plane changes. The second (and newer) offering is that they will onboard to your existing AWS operating environment and assist with running your applications.
There's definitely a market for something like this, because most software companies at a certain size end up needing to build something like this. The real question is, how much work will you need to do to fit your current software to their paradigm in order to get the benefit? For a newer project, there's likely little sunk cost, but for anything that's already productionalized, I don't doubt that the rework -- particularly around all the devops bits and pieces -- will likely be significant. And then of course, from a strategic standpoint, you need to balance the risks vs. rewards of hitching your wagon to Flightcontrol's set of conventions.
There will be a really solid chunk of projects that find good cost savings using this platform -- especially teams that are resource-constrained on devops and don't consider it their core competency.
Data point: I wouldn't use a service for this, but I can see that there are plenty who will. The defensible moat is pager duty as a service, every engineering org on the planet will push management for that.
Use it and like it. If using aws is a requirement but you don’t want to get bogged down with their user experience it’s worth it IMO.
Have run into some aws quirks leaking out of their abstraction. But personally that has only made me say “man if they couldn’t figure out how to make this clean, I would have been toast dealing with it on my own”
I built something very similar to this a few years ago, sold it for way less ($3/service), and ultimately decided not to spend money marketing it. Building the product made it super clear that AWS costs were grossly inflated, which they hid with dark UX, and I wanted to help small teams and hobbyists. Today, if you are a small team that doesn't really need more than one large VPS, you should seriously consider Docker Swarm. Not to say that Flightcontrol looks bad. In fact, it looks quite nice. Something like this could save you a lot of money if you would otherwise need full-time devops.
I think the problem with these general-purpose PaaS on top of Cloud is exactly that they're general-purpose. You will run into limitations and issues as soon as you start doing things only 5-10% of their customers need, like for example running privileged docker containers in kubernetes or wanting to manage parts of your infra with terraform.
I'd much rather see tools helping me deploy one particular niche use case in Cloud really well.
BTW I'm trying to follow this mantra while building https://staticbot.dev
Amazon has their own PaaS offering called Elastic Beanstalk, with support for running docker containers and other popular platforms. It's not complicated to set up and is customizable if you need to tweak things. Any idea how Flightcontrol compares to this?
41 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadLot of issues with slow AWS provision or missing APIs on AWS side so it would take hours to delete resources created by them.
> Managed ECS-EC2 clusters in preview
> AWS has a long standing issue with the ECS agent randomly disconnecting, resulting in orphaned EC2 instances which can cause traffic or deployment degradation.
> We have attempted to solve this a few ways in the past, but there were still critical edge cases falling through.
> So we bit the bullet, and developed a robust, full featured ECS cluster management solution to solve this problem once and for all.
> It's currently in private preview. To get early access before we roll it out to everyone, contact support.
I found elsewhere in the Flight control docs where they recommend ECs+EC2. While I'm not surprised to hear about issues with ECS+EC2, given the reported issues above I don't know if I'd recommend it in my docs. Fargate is a far better option for most use cases, at least in my experience. Unless you need specialized instance types, like GPU workloads.
[0]: https://roadmap.flightcontrol.dev/changelog
and then there's also flynn.
I really hate marketing speak like this. Terraform is there specifically to solve the Aws infrastructure complexity.you create your system once and minor changes if needed.
> Flightcontrol fully automates infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, and deployments. All within your own AWS account where you retain full visibility and control
Why does everyone think this is a desirable thing? Excluding adding to your aws price, you're now vendor locked in for your pipelines also.
I'm not seeing any benefits here for any already established company, maybe a small start-up of fresh graduates who don't want to learn Iac/DevOps ?
In fact, terraform exposes the complexity of AWS, since with terraform you need to hook everything up manually.
And avoiding vendor lock in is an illusion. Everyone is locked in to some extent. Just design things so you can move providers by understanding your system and architecting it correctly.
Not taking advantage of extra capabilities vendors provide you is just stupid. SQS/lambda is great. Why avoid it, because one day in the far future you might move to GCP? Protip: if you move to GCP (or Oracle cloud, or IBM cloud, or CloudFlare, etc) you're going to rebuild everything anyway.
For larger companies this will get shut down, because the idea of some random team deploying to the cloud by themselves is a security breach that hasn't been reported yet.
They introduced a cheaper plan since I tried it, but it's missing the main feature that I actually think makes FC worth it (preview environments)
I know not everyone wants to get in on the Vercel Cartel model of excessive free-tier generosity made up for by 1000% markups at scale... but $400/month is tough to swallow when you barely need $50/month of compute to handle your production workload.
- https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included/ - https://www.batteriesincl.com/
I am also working on similar tool[1] but it's bit more niche to batch jobs type functionality but not just limited to AWS rather it's cloud agnostic.
[1]: Daestro - https://daestro.com
They offer two discrete services. One is a simplified AWS where the interface is something like Service Now and you don't have access to the environment to make control plane changes. The second (and newer) offering is that they will onboard to your existing AWS operating environment and assist with running your applications.
It came to mind due to the iOS 26 "Games" app reminding me of 12-y/o "Achievements" that now only exist as flags in a database.
Thanks for the reminder.
There will be a really solid chunk of projects that find good cost savings using this platform -- especially teams that are resource-constrained on devops and don't consider it their core competency.
Have run into some aws quirks leaking out of their abstraction. But personally that has only made me say “man if they couldn’t figure out how to make this clean, I would have been toast dealing with it on my own”
I wanted to go with AWS but ended up with Digital Ocean / Vercel for personal stuffs due to concerns on AWS horror bills.
"bare metal"? Hmmm. I think we have different definitions of that phrase.