Blomstra, development services & scalable managed Flarum

Desireamaze

Sure thanks

matteocontrini

I agree it might seem costly but if you consider what's included (storage, email, etc.) and that it's a managed service, it's actually on point. It's not too far from what you would spend by self-hosting it with a decent setup ("man-time" excluded).

Certainly the price for the entry-level plan is not that affordable but I can understand why 🙂

luceos

matteocontrini I agree it might seem costly but if you consider what's included (storage, email, etc.) and that it's a managed service, it's actually on point. It's not too far from what you would spend by self-hosting it with a decent setup ("man-time" excluded).

Yeah, it's fully scalable too and managed. No need to do complication migrations when you grow, implement your queues or scheduled tasks or switch over to a different websocket solution; we all got that covered. However we still recommend (especially larger) clients to configure their own email provider for sending because we still don't have the manpower to guarantee the best IP rating yet. Fighting spamlists is a fulltime job honestly. And defaulting to a third party service would bump the price unnecessarily.

matteocontrini Certainly the price for the entry-level plan is not that affordable but I can understand why

Lower plans will be considered later on when we matured the platform enough. Introducing those at affordable levels would require modulations to the stack that we'd rather not introduce right now.

luceos

Early June the platform we had was running smoothly, but was utterly destroyed due to the unexpected inability of Linode to scale our kubernetes control plane. The downtime caused due to this was disastrous and something we decided to ingrain into our vision for the future to prohibit from happening again.

That is why we are currently switching over to the Google Kubernetes Engine. Google has been fundamental in creating, maintaining and supporting kubernetes as an open source project. Their cloud is exceeding excellence and as such makes a perfect fit to the ambition of Blomstra to provide quality managed Flarum communities. Work is required from our end to move over, but we're already well on our way to go into an open beta later this year.

My apologies to all of you we have kept waiting, but we prefer to provide the services at a level you appreciate.

As a consequence we modified our timeline and decided to bring forward another plan we hoped to have started later next year. Starting today Blomstra is providing Flarum development, this includes commissioned extensions but also customisations in terms of design and layout. We will also be available for any Flarum related consultancy. Yours truly and @IanM will be your contacts for any of these assignments, unified under the Blomstra name.

matteocontrini

luceos interesting, could you perhaps share what happened with scaling on Linode?

Also, is there a particular reason why you're avoiding AWS? 😆 I've heard mixed opinions about GCP.

anonymousDev

Wait a minute @luceos
Plans from 49 euro/month? Simultanous users limit in XXI century? Seriously?
What is Managed email sending?

Taking users limit into consideration, Focus on your community growth ( from your motto ) sounds like rather sad joke.......

Its cheaper to spin-up new ( high-end ) AWS instance, pay upfront for 1 year and install Flarum manually.........

One must be crazy to pay you for hosting @ Blomstra.

Edit:

Seems it's pretty hard reporting back here while you're very busy making things move forward 😃

Well, if you find reporting back here hard ( due to time constraints / amount of work / wwhatever ) than why not focus on one projet only? Flarum was first. So, either Flarum ( here ) or Blomstra. Especially when you say sth like this:

luceos Will take a look within the next hours.

And these hours turns out to be one month........ Not very good move both credibility-wise and business-wise; if you say sth, stick o it no matter what. Or, say nothing and do whatever.

luceos Google Kubernetes Engine

I would not trust anything from Google when it comes to business solutions..........

luceos

matteocontrini could you perhaps share what happened with scaling on Linode?

Their kubernetes control plane is not set up to scale automatically. They already deployed changes to do so, but haven't enabled them. The inability to scale the control plane caused it to crash. Without the control plane our cluster had no way to scale up or down nor execute scheduled tasks or recover failing services.

They are also working on highly available control planes, but that is expected somewhere at the end of the year. Until then we will not consider them as a sensible partner in our stack, even though they are a lovely group of people to work with.

matteocontrini is there a particular reason why you're avoiding AWS?

First and foremost, Google is known to be excellent with kubernetes. Secondly a mate of mine has worked for all three major cloud providers and recommends Google above all others. I have heard how the AWS stack is set up and I can't say I follow their conventions.

Hari What is the meaning of the word "blomstra" ?

Blomstra means "to flourish" or "fare well", I used a translator to translate "blooming" into Icelandic, that's also why we choose the iconic Icelandic flower saxifraga stellaris as a basis to our logo.

luceos

matteocontrini I have to add that there are some additional factors at play. Linode is a centralised company in the United States, this event happened during a national holiday. Knowledge about k8s wasn't readily available to the support agents and escalation took ages. Our team has a ton of knowledge about kubernetes and would have been able to cooperate with their kubernetes team to get the issues resolved in a timely manner, but we were kept in the dark for hours on end. I'm glad that our feedback was welcomed by them, and for our corporate applications we will remain to use them.

Hari

What is the meaning of the word "blomstra" ?

matteocontrini

luceos I see, however technical support with GCP is not free and bandwidth is much more costly. Do you think it could affect pricing plans?

kemot

luceos

Wow, you have been through a lot already! Linode>GCP>now Azure.

Have you considered building your own kubernetes cluster? It seems that managed kubernetes offerings are still not up to the task. I hope that Azure will be good though!

luceos

matteocontrini yes, there's a chance our plans might need to be revised. We do hope it won't be necessary though.

luceos

I've posted an update about the state of Blomstra on our Greenhouse community. To sum it up:

New outage on one community due to issues on the Linode Kubernetes platform, which was resolved too slowly for our liking.
Google Kubernetes Engine held our initial hope, but their quota logic is overly convoluted and increases take too long.
We are currently working to migrate towards Microsoft Azure, which has been a joy to work with in terms of response from their staff, as well as their technical offerings.

All these setbacks has postponed our public beta, we're hoping to open up in the last quarter this year.

https://blomstra.community/d/60-platform-changes-2021-q3

luceos

Today the Blomstra Greenhouse community was migrated off of Linode to Microsoft Azure. Next up is moving closed beta customers as well. Once that is completed we will be revisit our pricing, optimize the stack further and prepare for the open beta.

In the meantime we made some huge progress on supporting Extiverse's latest feature, private premium extensions. Extension developers can publish premium extensions onto Extiverse visible only to subscribing clients. @glowingblue for instance is already using this functionality for some of their clients. For us, at Blomstra, it made sense to do our best to offer similar functionality on our platform. @IanM and I reworked the code responsible for the interaction with Extiverse and we're proud to say that our platform now fully supports private premium extensions as well.

luceos

Almost a month ago 🤦 , but the open beta is close now. Hold onto your socks everyone 😁

Those who signed up on our waiting list will receive their promotional code in the coming days 👏

luceos

kemot Wow, you have been through a lot already! Linode>GCP>now Azure.

Oh yeah and that considering three of the Blomstra founders have quite the experience when it comes to hosting. Our use case is very specific as we only want to scale one software: Flarum. Reliably, performant; I think it's been the best decision to feel our way to the most suitable provider (for now). We've already seen great progress in the Linode team, mind you. But we'll stick with Azure so that we can grow a reliable platform.

kemot Have you considered building your own kubernetes cluster?

It's something we considered, but we realized that we can never provide the level of service any large managed kubernetes provider can deliver. We need immediate scalability, future multi region support and managed databases.

luceos

Hello everyone 👋,

On January 5th I publicly announced having co-founded a company as a commercial companion to the Flarum Foundation. In the long term to fund its development efforts, but also as a major contributor of the Flarum ecosystem.

Blomstra, providing managed Flarum communities, is now in open beta! Back then I mentioned that "2021 will bring you an amazing managed Flarum solution" and we did it! The past months we have worked hard to create a scalable, reliable, fast and climate friendly platform for any size of community. We even introduced the ability to use every premium extension available on Extiverse and support developers (both freelancers and companies) in offering private extensions to their clients from within our hosting services.

A couple of other benefits of our platform

Our lowest plan (Seedling 50 which offers a trial period) is sufficient for many small to medium communities. Only guests and members, excluding bots, count towards your online users limit.
Exceeding your plan size does not cause your community to go down. We monitor these limits and reach out to you in case your occasional overuse turns into a consistent pattern and an upgrade is recommended.
Already over 100 extensions are supported! We review every new addition and do our best to support the respective maintainers in building compatible, bug free and secure extensions.

The platform has already been tested by a handful of very patient customers. Their communities have been fundamental in testing scale, resolving bugs and optimizing for performance. Our open beta, as such, no longer is about the bare essentials of our hosting services, but about gaining momentum and scale. We're very excited to be able to open our doors to you, if you have any questions feel free to respond here or reach out to us via helpdesk@blomstra.net.

To celebrate our open beta we are offering a limited number of lifetime licenses of the Blomstra Payments extension for only $ 49,90.

Thanks for following us on this great adventure!

Darkle

luceos Congratulations! it's amazing how much the Blomstra team have worked and tested to launch the open beta, I'm sure that despite the difficulties that took you longer than you thought it would, has strengthened Blomstra as a platform, something very valuable for the future 🔮

meetdilip

luceos Good luck 🙂

MikeJones

"Thumbs Up" since flarum doesn't allow me to thumbs up your post anymore 😀

Justoverclock

MikeJones same for me 😃

luceos

MikeJones Justoverclock, I still need to look into that. I'm not sure why this happens, maybe @jordanjay29 is trolling my account somehow 😬

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