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I used Flynn for a side project. When it worked it was awesome and simple, but it was a bit too unpredictable and flakey for me to feel comfortable using it in

I used Flynn for a side project. When it worked it was awesome and simple, but it was a bit too unpredictable and flakey for me to feel comfortable using it in my company. Dokku has been rock solid for almost 5 years now for my business. Would love to have multiple nodes but otherwise fantastic and easy. I had to move off Heroku as my customers require an Australian based host and heroku doesn’t support the region. Migrating was a breeze. I wanted to love Flynn and checked back in it every year or so but the blogs stopped a long while back and the brief documentation never really fleshed out.

golemiprague 6y ago
How do you deal with maintaining and securing the servers? The big advantage of Heroku is that for small projects you don't have to deal with server maintenance, you just upload and forget. Isn't using Dokku kind of miss the whole point?
- josegonzalez 6y ago
  Maintainer of Dokku here. If you can use Heroku, I would encourage you to do so. While the price seems high, the value add you get from just its feature-set and the ecosystem is tremendous. Seriously, even if you just pay 7 bucks for an always-on dyno, you can get pretty damn far without needing to worry about a server. I've been on a few platform teams, and we've always been _miles_ away from the functionality Heroku provides. That aside, there are a number of reasons something like Dokku (or insert your favorite self-managed platform here) may be a good idea for your organization: - You need to own your availability: With Heroku, you're at the mercy of Heroku, Salesforce, and Amazon (roughly in that order). Sometimes there is a mandate that your org cannot use services provided by certain companies, or you need an SLA that you can control for a third party. While I don't necessarily agree with those reasons, there are plenty of cases where owning your availability is more important than saving on the cost of building and running the platform. - You cannot use an external vendor: Sometimes you want something to run in your closet for the 40 self-hosted apps you run, and you cannot install Heroku in your closet. Maybe you work at a non-profit and you cannot easily justify the extra expense (either because of paperwork or because money is tight). Running your own platform is quite enticing in these sorts of cases. - Running "at scale" is expensive: If you work at a consulting firm and are working on a couple dozen apps for customers, something like Heroku can start adding up, especially if you want staging environments for functionality. We have a ton of users that switch to Dokku for staging, and then end up hosting in other places for HA functionality they don't want to maintain. - While we might support Kubernetes and Nomad, the complexity of maintaining these systems just for staging can seem silly. - The platform does not support the functionality you need: While Heroku is _excellent_, it doesn' support everything, and it doesn't need to in order to service it's customers. When you find yourself reaching outside the box, that is when owning your platform becomes important. Yeah, Dokku might seem like it's missing the point, and yet there are thousands of companies - small and large - building and maintaining their own version of Heroku (with varying degrees of success). I think in that sense, Dokku does quite well since it is flexible enough that it's "batteries included but removable".

golemiprague 6y ago

How do you deal with maintaining and securing the servers? The big advantage of Heroku is that for small projects you don't have to deal with server maintenance, you just upload and forget. Isn't using Dokku kind of miss the whole point?

josegonzalez 6y ago
Maintainer of Dokku here. If you can use Heroku, I would encourage you to do so. While the price seems high, the value add you get from just its feature-set and the ecosystem is tremendous. Seriously, even if you just pay 7 bucks for an always-on dyno, you can get pretty damn far without needing to worry about a server. I've been on a few platform teams, and we've always been _miles_ away from the functionality Heroku provides. That aside, there are a number of reasons something like Dokku (or insert your favorite self-managed platform here) may be a good idea for your organization: - You need to own your availability: With Heroku, you're at the mercy of Heroku, Salesforce, and Amazon (roughly in that order). Sometimes there is a mandate that your org cannot use services provided by certain companies, or you need an SLA that you can control for a third party. While I don't necessarily agree with those reasons, there are plenty of cases where owning your availability is more important than saving on the cost of building and running the platform. - You cannot use an external vendor: Sometimes you want something to run in your closet for the 40 self-hosted apps you run, and you cannot install Heroku in your closet. Maybe you work at a non-profit and you cannot easily justify the extra expense (either because of paperwork or because money is tight). Running your own platform is quite enticing in these sorts of cases. - Running "at scale" is expensive: If you work at a consulting firm and are working on a couple dozen apps for customers, something like Heroku can start adding up, especially if you want staging environments for functionality. We have a ton of users that switch to Dokku for staging, and then end up hosting in other places for HA functionality they don't want to maintain. - While we might support Kubernetes and Nomad, the complexity of maintaining these systems just for staging can seem silly. - The platform does not support the functionality you need: While Heroku is _excellent_, it doesn' support everything, and it doesn't need to in order to service it's customers. When you find yourself reaching outside the box, that is when owning your platform becomes important. Yeah, Dokku might seem like it's missing the point, and yet there are thousands of companies - small and large - building and maintaining their own version of Heroku (with varying degrees of success). I think in that sense, Dokku does quite well since it is flexible enough that it's "batteries included but removable".