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I came to the comments first to answer "what's the catch?". There were no comments at the time so I went to the website. This line near the top seems particular

I came to the comments first to answer "what's the catch?". There were no comments at the time so I went to the website. This line near the top seems particularly fair and believable. > Own your own PAAS. Infrastructure at a fraction of the cost. Powered by Docker, you can install Dokku on any hardware. Use it on inexpensive cloud providers. Use the extra cash to buy a pony or feed kittens. You'll save tens of dollars a year on your dog photo sharing website.

viraptor 4y ago
I've used it on and off. It's ok and I was happy. But it's a fairly thin layer and a leaky abstraction, so I ended up looking at docker logs and firewall rules more times than needed. Unfortunately when things were down, noting the context was not a priority, so I don't have specific issues raised to show.
- josegonzalez 4y ago
  Dokku Maintainer here: While in some cases it is a quite thin layer - some commands just proxy along to the underlying Docker command + some flags - I'd love to hear more about places where Dokku itself wasn't useful for debugging your deployed system. Please feel more than free to reach out via Discord/IRC/Slack[1] (all three are synced) with more info if filing an issue is a big reach. I'm more than happy to help folks debug live/file issues as a result, as it makes the project much better. [1] https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/where-to-get-help/ https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/where-to-get-help/
mdasen 4y ago
For me, one of the big catches is that you have a single point of failure. Dokku doesn't run over multiple VMs you have. It's on a VM. If that VM goes down, you're down. I think one of the selling points of Heroku is that if the box you're running on goes down, your service will just be started on another box and traffic will be routed there and you don't need to do anything.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  If the box you are running in is a VM, the VM host is already providing hardware redundancy. It’s not full redundancy but in practice it’s sufficient for dog photo sharing sites.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    As far as I know only Google Cloud does ‘hardware redundancy’[0]. I’ve had single-instance outages in AWS and they don’t seem to really care if something goes wrong with your instance, although maybe they have more maintenance events than they let on and they might happen transparently to the user thanks to some form of live migration. 0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migration https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      I’m not talking about live migration - the instance will go down and there will be a brief outage while the instance restarts on another hypervisor. The same is true of a single dyno Heroku app.
      - electroly 4y ago
        For AWS, nothing involved there is automatic; you have to stop it* and then restart it. It will just stay broken until you restart it yourself. "Brief outage" suggests it might be automatic but in AWS it's not. * Possibly multiple times. Instances on degraded hosts have a tendency to get stuck and you have to stop, and then stop again to force stop it, and then sometimes even that doesn't work and you have to just wait. Source: have received lots of "EC2 Instance Retirement" emails
        mnd999 4y ago
        This is what autoscaling groups are for, right? If set the autoscaler to keep one instance running it will spin another one when they retire the one you’re using.

viraptor 4y ago

I've used it on and off. It's ok and I was happy. But it's a fairly thin layer and a leaky abstraction, so I ended up looking at docker logs and firewall rules more times than needed. Unfortunately when things were down, noting the context was not a priority, so I don't have specific issues raised to show.

josegonzalez 4y ago
Dokku Maintainer here: While in some cases it is a quite thin layer - some commands just proxy along to the underlying Docker command + some flags - I'd love to hear more about places where Dokku itself wasn't useful for debugging your deployed system. Please feel more than free to reach out via Discord/IRC/Slack[1] (all three are synced) with more info if filing an issue is a big reach. I'm more than happy to help folks debug live/file issues as a result, as it makes the project much better. [1] https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/where-to-get-help/ https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/where-to-get-help/

mdasen 4y ago

For me, one of the big catches is that you have a single point of failure. Dokku doesn't run over multiple VMs you have. It's on a VM. If that VM goes down, you're down. I think one of the selling points of Heroku is that if the box you're running on goes down, your service will just be started on another box and traffic will be routed there and you don't need to do anything.

jeremyjh 4y ago
If the box you are running in is a VM, the VM host is already providing hardware redundancy. It’s not full redundancy but in practice it’s sufficient for dog photo sharing sites.
- judge2020 4y ago
  As far as I know only Google Cloud does ‘hardware redundancy’[0]. I’ve had single-instance outages in AWS and they don’t seem to really care if something goes wrong with your instance, although maybe they have more maintenance events than they let on and they might happen transparently to the user thanks to some form of live migration. 0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migration https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I’m not talking about live migration - the instance will go down and there will be a brief outage while the instance restarts on another hypervisor. The same is true of a single dyno Heroku app.
    - electroly 4y ago
      For AWS, nothing involved there is automatic; you have to stop it* and then restart it. It will just stay broken until you restart it yourself. "Brief outage" suggests it might be automatic but in AWS it's not. * Possibly multiple times. Instances on degraded hosts have a tendency to get stuck and you have to stop, and then stop again to force stop it, and then sometimes even that doesn't work and you have to just wait. Source: have received lots of "EC2 Instance Retirement" emails
      - mnd999 4y ago
        This is what autoscaling groups are for, right? If set the autoscaler to keep one instance running it will spin another one when they retire the one you’re using.