13 ms·

Show HN: Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes

320 points by czhu12 1y ago

Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL certificate management - Team management - Github integration But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than expected, but after a year, I’ve made some good progress The best part of Canine, is that it also makes it trivial to host any helm chart, which is available for basically any open source project, so everything from databases (e.g. Postgres, Redis), to random stuff like torrent tracking servers, VPN’s endpoints, etc. Open source: https://github.com/czhu12/canine https://github.com/czhu12/canine Cloud hosted version is: https://canine.sh https://canine.sh

fuckyah 1y ago
[dead]
czhu12 1y ago
Would also add -- this has been by far the funnest project I've ever built. Owning the "tech stack" from top to bottom is a super satisfying feeling. Rails app Canine infra Raspberry pi server My own ISP Was a tech stack I managed to get an app running on, for some projects I've kicked around.
debarshri 1y ago
We maintain list of PaaS platform out there in the wild - https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas
- czhu12 1y ago
  Ah yeah I've been looking for these to submit to. Thanks, I'll submit a PR!
- westurner 1y ago
  dokku is a minimal PaaS that can also run on a VPS. There's a dokku-scheduler-kubernetes: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes But it doesn't have support Helm charts. Cloud computing architecture > Delivery links to SaaS, DaaS, DaaS, PaaS, IaaS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture Cloud-computing comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison Category:Cloud_platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms awesome-selfhosted has a serverless / FaaS category that just links to awesome-sysadmin > PaaS: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#software-development---faas--serverless https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sof...
  - emilsedgh 1y ago
    https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/ https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/ This is a more featureful version.
  - kot-behemoth 1y ago
    I’ve recently started an open-source self-hosted data platform (https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata) with Dokku being a great initial deployment mode. It’s mature, simple to get started and has tons of docs / tutorials. I collected a bunch of links while learning it, and launched https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku, as there wasn’t an “awesome” list. Hope it helps someone!
6r17 1y ago
[dead]
mkesper 1y ago
The README is confusing me, could you mention how Kubernetes is created from your docker compose setup?
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah, documentaiton is one area I've been meaning to spend more time in. The application runs outside of Kubernetes, it effectively manages a Kubernetes cluster and exposes a "heroku" like interface. This way, it doesn't result in having to host a separate app within your cluster, saving resources. I was kind of imagining this to be deploying to fairly small, indie hacker type setups, so making sure that it was resource efficient was relatively important. The docker compose set up is just for local development. I'll make that more clear, thanks for the feedback!
  - the__alchemist 1y ago
    Does this require docker and kubernetes?
rcarmo 1y ago
I’m curious as to how storage and secrets are handled, since my recurring issue with Kubernetes is not deploying the containers or monitoring them but having a sane way to ensure a (re)deployed app or stack would use the same storage and/or multiple apps would put their data in consistent locations. Also, having seen the demo video, it’s a happy path thing (public repo, has dockerfiles, etc. what about private code and images?)
conqrr 1y ago
Very cool. I've looked into doing something similar for self hosting and have wanted something in between docker and Kubernetes. Nomad seemed like a good fit, but still a tad more work that dead simple docker and lack of ecosystem. I finally gave in to just using docker and living with deployment downtime on upgrades which is fine for a personal home server. But for production services, I wonder how much of K8s does Canine really abstract? Do I ever need to peek underneath the hood? I'm no k8s expert, but I wonder if there is simply no happy medium between these two.
- psviderski 1y ago
  I'm actually building something in between Docker and Kubernetes: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud. Like you I wanted that middle ground without the operational overhead. It's basically Docker-like CLI and Docker Compose with multi-machine and production capabilities but no control plane to maintain. Still in active development but the goal is to keep it simple enough that you can easily understand what's happening at each layer and can troubleshoot.
  - conqrr 1y ago
    Looks promising and exactly what I want solved. Adding wireguard and Caddy is slick. How are you planning to go about Zero Downtime deploy? Maybe emulate Swarm?
    - psviderski 1y ago
      Thanks! For zero-downtime deploys, it does simple rolling updates one container at a time in a similar way k8s or swarm does it. It starts the new container alongside the old one, waits for it to become healthy, Caddy picks it up and updates its config, then removes the old one. The difference is that this process is driven by your CLI command (not a reconciliation loop in the cluster) so you get an instant feedback if something goes wrong.
stego-tech 1y ago
I dig the concept! K8s is an amazing technology hampered by overwhelming complexity (flashback vibes to the early days of x86 virtualization), and thumbing through your literature it seems you’ve got a good grasp of the fundamentals everyone needs in order to leverage K8s in more scenarios - especially areas where PVE, Microcloud, or Cockpit might end up being more popular within (namely self-hosting). I’ve got a spare N100 NUC at home that’s languishing with an unfinished Microcloud install; thinking of yanking that off and giving Canine a try instead!
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  i really don’t know where this complexity thing comes from anymore. maybe back in the day where a k8s cluster was a 2 hour kubespray run or something but it’s now a single yaml file and a ssh key if you use something like rke.
  - notnmeyer 1y ago
    i assume when people are talking about k8s complexity, it’s either more complicated scenarios, or they’re not talking about managed k8s. even then though, it’s more that complex needs are complex and not so much that k8s is the thing driving the complexity. if your primary complexity is k8s you either are doing it wrong or chose the wrong tool.
    - stego-tech 1y ago
      > or they’re not talking about managed k8s Bingo! Managed K8s on a hyperscaler is easy mode, and a godsend. I’m speaking from the cluster admin and bare metal perspectives, where it’s a frustrating exercise in micromanaging all these additional abstraction layers just to get the basic “managed” K8s functions in a reliable state. If you’re using managed K8s, then don’t @ me about “It’S nOt CoMpLeX” because we’re not even in the same book, let alone the same chapter. Hypervisors can deploy to bare metal and shared storage without much in the way of additional configuration, but K8s requires defining PVs, storage classes, network layers, local DNS, local firewalls and routers, etc, most of which it does not want to play nicely with pre-1.20 out of the box. It’s gotten better these past two years for sure, but it’s still not as plug-and-play as something like ESXi+vSphere/RHEL+Cockpit/PVE, and that’s a damn shame. Hence why I’m always eager to drive something like Canine! (EDIT: and unless you absolutely have a reason to do bare metal self-hosted K8s from binaries you should absolutely be on a managed K8s cluster provider of some sort. Seriously, the headaches aren’t worth the cost savings for any org of size)
nwienert 1y ago
First - I really want something like this to exists and be great, so best of luck. As of today I'd consider this or Dokploy (Docker Swarm is underrated). Small feedback - your "Why you should NOT use Canine" section actually is a net-negative for me. I actually was thinking it was cool that it may actually list downsides, but then you did a sarcastic thing that was annoying. I think you should just be frank - you'll have to purchase and manage servers, you'll be on the hook if they go down and have to get them back up, this is an early product made by one person, etc.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  100% agreed on both points.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Haha, well there goes my attempt to be different from the other landing pages out there. I'll take another stab, but appreciate the feedback!
  - 1oooqooq 1y ago
    please keep it. it is awesome (and have to be said)! (but add the critical points too)
  - harrisreynolds 1y ago
    Yeah... I like this "Why you should not use Canine" section too. I was just on Posthog's site this morning and saw a similar section... https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rky248hgutwzzkzwhifxz/posthog-screenshot.png?rlkey=v9ltrh5k1gjgcoz0dw0coycj4&st=fynernfg&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rky248hgutwzzkzwhifxz/posthog...
    - nwienert 1y ago
      I'm all for doing it, the problem as-is is there are real downsides to something like Canine especially when it's super early like this. Posthog gets away with it because they aren't alpha (and have better humor, amongst other things). I say keep it, just add some honesty there too.
serbuvlad 1y ago
On the webpage at the "Why you should NOT use Canine" section, it is possible to swipe away a card that is in the background, which is very weird UX. Chrome 137. Android 13. Other than that... I'll give it a shot. Have three N100 NUCs. Two are currently unused after failed attempts to learn to use k8s. Maybe this'll do the trick.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Yeah the background card swiping is confusing. I understand why it happens but it should not be possible when only a tiny sliver of the card is shown.
Everhusk 1y ago
I've also always wondered why computing costs keep going down but cloud costs keep going up. You deserve an award for building this, thank you.
Everhusk 1y ago
I've always wondered why cloud costs keep going up, while computing costs keep going down. You deserve an award for building this, thank you!
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah in our last year at my previous company, we spent over ~$400k on what amounted to about ~512GB of memory across our fleet of 8 instances on a PaaS vendor. We were almost always memory bound, so I don't even know the compute side. Given that the hardware itself now costs less than 8k to purchase outright, just seemed ridiculous. Albeit we did have SOC2, enterprise plan, etc, but it was a painful bill every quarter.
  - bbkane 1y ago
    https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-cloud-exit-savings-will-now-top-ten-million-over-five-years-c7d9b5bd https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-cloud-exit-savings-will-now-to... - this blog post made the rounds last year; makes a similar case
utf_8x 1y ago
Any particular reason why this runs outside the cluster?
- dboreham 1y ago
  Don't know anything about this project, but usually the reason is "because there could be N clusters", and sometimes "because I want the cluster to come and go frequently" (e.g. for testing workloads).
- czhu12 1y ago
  Main reason is that I wanted to be able to support single VPS K3s clusters all the way down to ~512MB. K3s already takes up about 100MB which only leaves 400 for the application, so trying to run Canine on that machine would probably create too much bloat.
film42 1y ago
Looks great! I'm definitely in the market for something like this; and building on top of helm charts makes me want to try it out. Can Canine automatically upgrade my helm charts? That would be killer. I usually stay on cloud-hosted paid plans because remembering to upgrade is not fun. The next reason is that I often need to recall the ops knowledge just after I've forgotten it.
- czhu12 1y ago
  It can apply upgrades but I don't think it solves your core problem, which is how to perform upgrades safely. Most of the time its totally fine, but sometimes a config key changes across versions. Upgrading helm charts without some manual monitoring seems like it might still be an unsolved problem :(
eviluncle 1y ago
So nice to see modern open source being built with rails. it's the ultimate productivity framework
vanillax 1y ago
Can you make it so I can use my existing k8 cluster? or does it have to always use your embedded k3s? It seems like if you are just using k3s it should be easy to bring your own...
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yep, its intended to be used with k8s clusters, k3s is more of an exceptional usecase but I wanted to be able to support super cheap, single instance machines. I’ll try to make that more clear in the homepage / readme
  - vanillax 1y ago
    k3s is kubernetes. K8s == k3s. There is no difference. Just different distributions like linux.
vanillax 1y ago
Nit pick. Kubernetes doesnt run docker containers. It run containers that conform to the Open Container Initiative ( OCI ) . Docker is a licensed brand name.
- cmckn 1y ago
  Another nit here: https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubernetes-crash-course/introduction https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern... I know this is just a general description, but “10,000 servers” —> Kubernetes actually only claims support up to 5,000 nodes: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-large/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg... Plenty of larger clusters exist, but this usually requires extensive tuning (such as entirely replacing the API registry). And obviously the specific workload plays a large role. Kubernetes is actually quite far from supporting larger clusters out of the box, though most releases include some work in that direction.
  - czhu12 1y ago
    Ah yeah I could be wrong. In my early days at Airbnb, I recall someone doing an internal test to prove it could scale to 10k servers, but this was back in 2016 and I wasn't the one doing the test. I'll walk that back
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- cchance 1y ago
  Yep i hate when i see docker required id ont run anything with docker anymore just podman and containerd for the most part
TheTaytay 1y ago
First of all, I'm often looking for a better "Heroku-esque" experience on my own metal, so thank you! This looks neat! Also, your docs on how K8s works look really good, and might be the most approachable docs I've seen on the subject. https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubernetes-crash-course/introduction https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern... Question: I assumed when I read the pitch, that I could spin up a managed K8s somewhere, like in Digital Ocean, and use this somehow. But after reading docs and comments, it sounds like this needs to manage my K8s for me? I guess my question is: 1) When I spin up a "Cluster" on Hetzner, is that just dividing up a single machine, or is it a true K8s cluster that spans across multiple machines? 2) If I run this install script on another server, does it join the cluster, giving me true distributed servers to host the pods? 3) Is there a way to take an existing managed K8s and have Canine deploy to it?
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah so at the moment it kind of supports two options: 1. A single Hetzner VPS 2. An existing Kubernetes cluster. I usually use #1 for staging / development apps, and then #2 for production apps. For #2, I manage the number of nodes on the Digital Ocean side, and kubernetes just magically reschedules my workload accordingly (also can turn on auto scaling). I think the thing that you're getting at that is not supported is having Canine create a multi-node cluster directly within Hetzner. There is a terraform to create a Kubernetes cluster from hetzner, but this isn't currently installed on Canine. I'm not closed to trying it out, there were a few UI improvements I wanted to take a shot at first, but at the moment Canine assume's you have a cluster ready to go, or can help you walk through a K3s installation to a single VPS. https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...
  - TheTaytay 1y ago
    Oh! This is good news! I was not asking about K8s on Hetzner per se. I was asking if I could spin up a managed cluster (on Digital Ocean, etc) and use this on it. It sounds like I can, which is great! I think I missed that in the docs.
lloydjones 1y ago
I started using Coolify a few months ago — Do you have a “pitch” as to how Canine is different or better? Good work either way!
- bitpush 1y ago
  Isnt Coolify a Vercel alternative? In that, you dont see any k8s primitives (services, load balancer etc). In my head, I put coolify, vercel as higher in the stack. fly.io, heroku, canine to be closer to metal, and all the on the metal is k8s and friends.
  - lloydjones 1y ago
    That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Though I do believe that Coolify will “eventually” support Kubernetes, I think what you’re saying feels right to me.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah coolify is great, and they’re light years ahead on features. Main difference is that coolify supports mostly single node deployments (I could be wrong about this). A single beefy vps could handle a massive amount of load, but for a lot of orgs, it doesn’t quite meet needs for resiliency, workloads, etc. Canine is built on Kubernetes, so it can take advantage of the entire ecosystem, helm charts, third party add ons, etc. A good example: I was able to deploy Dagster + clickhouse, hosted behind a VPN with telepresence, all with canine, with a few clicks. I think for personal projects, coolify is more than enough though, and probably the better option at the moment. Most of my next year will just be adding features coolify already supports.
  - lloydjones 1y ago
    Got it — Thanks for getting back to me!
jambay 1y ago
The interaction design looks fairly intuitive. Good luck!
tiffanyh 1y ago
Isn't Heroku build on Erlang/OTP because it essentially has Kubernetes-like functionality out-of-box.
fuckyah 1y ago
[dead]
tonyhart7 1y ago
this is identical to https://www.kubero.dev/ https://www.kubero.dev/ the problem is that kubero, Idk they did not gain any traction. maybe most user want simple tools like coolify
- Terretta 1y ago
  > they did not gain any traction. Energy on this project: https://github.com/czhu12/canine/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/czhu12/canine/graphs/code-frequency
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    that's a lot work TODO especially how barebone the project is
yarone 1y ago
This is awesome, great work!
indigodaddy 1y ago
The video example is a little confusing from a "I just want to self host the whole thing on a single machine/VM etc" perspective. If that's what I want to do, do I still have to create a cluster by putting in some managed DO K8s reference? Eg I just want it to use the local VM for the cluster. Do you have some other videos or can you make some that show say how to install it all-in-one on a single machine, and then from there how to add/deploy an app?
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah, so the setup I have there is basically: for staging / non prod apps, I typically just boot a single Hetzner VPS, and then install a K8 compliant server, then I'm off to the races. Production, I usually use digital ocean, so then I get a managed kubernetes, but also a managed postgres within the same data center for latency needs. Let's me sleep easier at night :)
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Gotcha, I just think a big part of your audience will want to one-box it for personal hobbyist apps and projects. Do you have documentation for your staging approach?
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Is RKE2 and/or K3S (eg Rancher products) K8 compliant? (edit, looked it up and Google AI apparently says yes..)
znpy 1y ago
I used heroku manh years ago and i have fond memories of it. I think the landing page fails at answering the two most basic questions: 1. Can i deploy via a stupid simple “git push” ? 2. Can i express what my workloads are via a stupid simple Procfile?
reassess_blind 1y ago
Is there an option to just drag drop project files, instead of using GitHub? That’s how I prefer to test these out.
bravesoul2 1y ago
Brilliant if an entire industry becomes a commodity complement because some angry dev got fed up of paying $400. Love it!
matus_congrady 1y ago
At https://stacktape.com https://stacktape.com, we're also in the same space. We're offering Heroku-like experience on top of your own AWS account. I like what you're doing. But, to behonst, it's a tough market. While the promise of $265 vs $4 might seem like a no-brainer, you're comparing apples to oranges. - Your DX is most likely be far from Heroku's. Their developer experience is refined by 100,000s developers. It's hard to think through everything, and you're very unlikely to make it anywhere close, once you go beyond simple use-cases. - A "single VM" setup is not really production-grade. You're lacking reliability, scalability, redundancy and many more features that these platforms have. It definitely works for low-traffic side-projects. But people or entities that actually have a budget for something like this, and are willing to pay, are usually looking for a different solution. That being said, I wish you all the luck. Maybe things change it the AI-generated apps era.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah I agree with you, but I think thats why maybe Kubernetes is a good place to work from. It already has a massive API with a pretty large ecosystem, so at the base level, the `kubectl` developer experience is about as good as any could be. K8 also makes it reasonably easy to scale to massive clusters, with good resilience, without too much of a hiccup
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  Hey, if you’re going to offer constructive feedback to a competitor, maybe don’t lead with a plug.
federicotdn 1y ago
I can't get Project creation to work. I click on "Deploy from Docker Hub instead →", fill in the details (name, image, cluster), and when I click Submit, I'm taken to the Projects page again (empty). edit: looks like POST https://canine.sh/projects https://canine.sh/projects is returning 422.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Weird, I'll take a look, guessing theres a permission issue with reaching the docker hub. Is it a private repository? I think last time I tried deploying an image with Dockerhub, the token that was provisioned didn't have read access. At the very least, theres. bug with showing a better error message so I'll do that now!
  - federicotdn 1y ago
    Indeed, private repo
the__alchemist 1y ago
Is this simple to deploy to and use like Heroku, or do I need to use docking and kubertenes? I would love a cheaper Heroku!
JeffMcCune 1y ago
Is Google sheets backend (from the screenshot in the readme) what I think it is? Sheets API as a database? If so props to you. My original idea behind https://holos.run https://holos.run was to create a Heorku like experience for k8s so I’m super happy to see this existing in the world. I’d love to explore an integration, potentially spinning up the single or multi node clusters with cluster api.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Haha yeah exactly, https://google-sheets-backend.canine.sh/ https://google-sheets-backend.canine.sh/ I wondered how easy it would be to vibe code something like this, turns out, super easy
hardwaresofton 1y ago
Congrats on the launch Chris! Product has come a long way
lotyrin 1y ago
Any support (or timeline for support) for what heroku calls "review apps" (PRs automatically become ephemeral staged environment)? Skimming the docs and repo I didn't see any.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Not yet, was on the roadmap, as well as Gitlab support. I was going to trickle out the updates over the next few weeks
konexis007 1y ago
How does this compare with caprover or dokku?
bpiroman 1y ago
Just use Kamal and deploy to a Hetzner instance
asadawadia 1y ago
How do you handle abuse/malicious user code being run on your server ?
- jdsleppy 1y ago
  This is for running code on your own servers, he doesn't deal with running others' code.
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
dabbz 1y ago
How do the Addons work? Are they just pre-built Dockerfile s? Or is there more to them? I'd love to request mariadb if there's something special beyond just a dockerfile/docker image.
varun_chopra 1y ago
I think you do need to support being able to add more nodes to the Hetzner install. Then it'd be perfect.
reconnecting 1y ago
Your website stated that license is now 2024 and license is MIT. `© 2024 Canine, Inc. MIT License.` When the ability to display the current year on the webpage is not critical, the difference between the Apache license (as listed on GitHub) and the MIT license (as listed on the website) is more significant concern. What is the actual one?
nylonstrung 1y ago
Does this run k3s?
nodesocket 1y ago
Very cool. How does Caine compare to Portainer? I assume Caine has much easier integrated git push deployment and CI/CD integration.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
I see they're still using the old 2000s-style "dev", "test", "prod" environments. How many developers here are aware that this is a bad pattern? Do you use it even though you know it's a bad pattern, and if so, why?
- aloknnikhil 1y ago
  Since when did having isolated environments for dev / test and prod become a bad pattern?
  - 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    Since around the time "cattle not pets" philosophy was coined. dev and test are pets, ephemeral environments are cattle.
- diamondfist25 1y ago
  is it a bad pattern? i'd love to know more cuz im starting on this route for my hetzner k3s setup
  - 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    I hesitate to call it an anti-pattern but it kind of is. It leads you down some bad paths. - In the best possible scenario: 1) you're spending time to duplicate configuration between dev, test, and prod, any time the environments change, 2) you hope your testing in one environment is actually borne out in prod, 3) you are shutting down dev & test when they're not in use (to save money), 4) you rebuild it all regularly to ensure it's still actually repeatable to repair or rebuild it, 5) you do maintenance on all 3 regularly to stay up to date on security patches and dependencies, 6) you still do trunk-based development that just deploys to each environment successively with automated functional tests, which makes one of the environments (either dev or test) unnecessary, and the other inaccurate - In the more likely scenario: 1) your "duplication" of configuration is inaccurate or literally not the same, leading to differences which cause bugs, 2) your results in prod don't mimic those in test, 3) you aren't shutting down dev/test when not in use, leading to not only unnecessary charges, but potential security issues if they get compromised (because who secures dev/test?), 4) you never rebuild it, so when there's an issue and you need to repair or replace it, you have no idea how to do it again, or the automation doesn't work, so you spend more time fixing it while your stuff is down, 5) you never do maintenance, leading to failed disks, out of date software, and general maintenance headaches, 6) you are probably not doing trunk based development, but cherry-picking changes from a "dev", "test", and "prod" branch, ending up with diverging codebases which don't match each other, and is a nightmare to debug and maintain That's the very short version of it, anyway. Thankfully there is a modern method which solves all those problems. Only use ephemeral environments, and production. The ephemeral environment is built from scratch whenever you want to test, and is shut down automatically after idleness. This ensures trunk-based development, allows multiple independent test deployments with specific feature-branch changes to exist simultaneously, re-tests all your automation constantly, uses the latest updates to avoid dependency stagnation, is versioned, saves money and resources, and eliminates security concerns. Faster development, fewer bugs, less money, less maintenance toil, less downtime, more security. But it's not popular on HN so nobody does it.
diamondfist25 1y ago
I just went thru this exercise of setting up k3s on hetzner by using this: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/ https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/ does this help?
serial_dev 1y ago
A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes!? If I need to know what Kubernetes is, Helm charts and whatnot, it's not really a Heroku alternative for me. I understand for some, managing them as basic as running "echo hello", but I don't want to even think about kubernetes and helm charts when I want something up and running very quickly.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Yeah that was the goal of Canine -- to never have to know that Kubernetes exists, but to still take advantage of its mature ecosystem. And then one day down the line, if you ever do need more powerful features, exposing the Kubernetes API's directly.
whitefang 1y ago
I found Coolify that solved the similar problem.
RamRodification 1y ago
I think there is a typo on "Day #4. Services" in the Kubernetes Crash Course. It says "NodePort services are not accessible to the internet", but I think the point being made is that they are?
mattfrommars 1y ago
OP, what is your background to be in the position to build this? I've been itching to build or have an idea to make something complicated but only true thing I kind of know is building API and integrating with React application. How were you able to deduce complexity into workable item/task to take 'I will alternate to Heroku' into fully functional open source project? I haven't really use Heroku, so to figure out 'feature to be implemented', I would start with pricing page. I am sure my approach is flawed here.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
chrisaiv 1y ago
Are there any charts that can compare this to Dokku, the Open Source equivalent of Heroku?

320 points by czhu12 1y ago

fuckyah 1y ago

[dead]

czhu12 1y ago

Would also add -- this has been by far the funnest project I've ever built. Owning the "tech stack" from top to bottom is a super satisfying feeling. Rails app Canine infra Raspberry pi server My own ISP Was a tech stack I managed to get an app running on, for some projects I've kicked around.

debarshri 1y ago

We maintain list of PaaS platform out there in the wild - https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas

czhu12 1y ago
Ah yeah I've been looking for these to submit to. Thanks, I'll submit a PR!
westurner 1y ago
dokku is a minimal PaaS that can also run on a VPS. There's a dokku-scheduler-kubernetes: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes But it doesn't have support Helm charts. Cloud computing architecture > Delivery links to SaaS, DaaS, DaaS, PaaS, IaaS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture Cloud-computing comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison Category:Cloud_platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms awesome-selfhosted has a serverless / FaaS category that just links to awesome-sysadmin > PaaS: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#software-development---faas--serverless https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sof...
- emilsedgh 1y ago
  https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/ https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/ This is a more featureful version.
- kot-behemoth 1y ago
  I’ve recently started an open-source self-hosted data platform (https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata) with Dokku being a great initial deployment mode. It’s mature, simple to get started and has tons of docs / tutorials. I collected a bunch of links while learning it, and launched https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku, as there wasn’t an “awesome” list. Hope it helps someone!

6r17 1y ago

[dead]

mkesper 1y ago

The README is confusing me, could you mention how Kubernetes is created from your docker compose setup?

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah, documentaiton is one area I've been meaning to spend more time in. The application runs outside of Kubernetes, it effectively manages a Kubernetes cluster and exposes a "heroku" like interface. This way, it doesn't result in having to host a separate app within your cluster, saving resources. I was kind of imagining this to be deploying to fairly small, indie hacker type setups, so making sure that it was resource efficient was relatively important. The docker compose set up is just for local development. I'll make that more clear, thanks for the feedback!
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  Does this require docker and kubernetes?

rcarmo 1y ago

I’m curious as to how storage and secrets are handled, since my recurring issue with Kubernetes is not deploying the containers or monitoring them but having a sane way to ensure a (re)deployed app or stack would use the same storage and/or multiple apps would put their data in consistent locations. Also, having seen the demo video, it’s a happy path thing (public repo, has dockerfiles, etc. what about private code and images?)

conqrr 1y ago

Very cool. I've looked into doing something similar for self hosting and have wanted something in between docker and Kubernetes. Nomad seemed like a good fit, but still a tad more work that dead simple docker and lack of ecosystem. I finally gave in to just using docker and living with deployment downtime on upgrades which is fine for a personal home server. But for production services, I wonder how much of K8s does Canine really abstract? Do I ever need to peek underneath the hood? I'm no k8s expert, but I wonder if there is simply no happy medium between these two.

psviderski 1y ago
I'm actually building something in between Docker and Kubernetes: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud. Like you I wanted that middle ground without the operational overhead. It's basically Docker-like CLI and Docker Compose with multi-machine and production capabilities but no control plane to maintain. Still in active development but the goal is to keep it simple enough that you can easily understand what's happening at each layer and can troubleshoot.
- conqrr 1y ago
  Looks promising and exactly what I want solved. Adding wireguard and Caddy is slick. How are you planning to go about Zero Downtime deploy? Maybe emulate Swarm?
  - psviderski 1y ago
    Thanks! For zero-downtime deploys, it does simple rolling updates one container at a time in a similar way k8s or swarm does it. It starts the new container alongside the old one, waits for it to become healthy, Caddy picks it up and updates its config, then removes the old one. The difference is that this process is driven by your CLI command (not a reconciliation loop in the cluster) so you get an instant feedback if something goes wrong.

stego-tech 1y ago

I dig the concept! K8s is an amazing technology hampered by overwhelming complexity (flashback vibes to the early days of x86 virtualization), and thumbing through your literature it seems you’ve got a good grasp of the fundamentals everyone needs in order to leverage K8s in more scenarios - especially areas where PVE, Microcloud, or Cockpit might end up being more popular within (namely self-hosting). I’ve got a spare N100 NUC at home that’s languishing with an unfinished Microcloud install; thinking of yanking that off and giving Canine a try instead!

cyberpunk 1y ago
i really don’t know where this complexity thing comes from anymore. maybe back in the day where a k8s cluster was a 2 hour kubespray run or something but it’s now a single yaml file and a ssh key if you use something like rke.
- notnmeyer 1y ago
  i assume when people are talking about k8s complexity, it’s either more complicated scenarios, or they’re not talking about managed k8s. even then though, it’s more that complex needs are complex and not so much that k8s is the thing driving the complexity. if your primary complexity is k8s you either are doing it wrong or chose the wrong tool.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    > or they’re not talking about managed k8s Bingo! Managed K8s on a hyperscaler is easy mode, and a godsend. I’m speaking from the cluster admin and bare metal perspectives, where it’s a frustrating exercise in micromanaging all these additional abstraction layers just to get the basic “managed” K8s functions in a reliable state. If you’re using managed K8s, then don’t @ me about “It’S nOt CoMpLeX” because we’re not even in the same book, let alone the same chapter. Hypervisors can deploy to bare metal and shared storage without much in the way of additional configuration, but K8s requires defining PVs, storage classes, network layers, local DNS, local firewalls and routers, etc, most of which it does not want to play nicely with pre-1.20 out of the box. It’s gotten better these past two years for sure, but it’s still not as plug-and-play as something like ESXi+vSphere/RHEL+Cockpit/PVE, and that’s a damn shame. Hence why I’m always eager to drive something like Canine! (EDIT: and unless you absolutely have a reason to do bare metal self-hosted K8s from binaries you should absolutely be on a managed K8s cluster provider of some sort. Seriously, the headaches aren’t worth the cost savings for any org of size)

nwienert 1y ago

First - I really want something like this to exists and be great, so best of luck. As of today I'd consider this or Dokploy (Docker Swarm is underrated). Small feedback - your "Why you should NOT use Canine" section actually is a net-negative for me. I actually was thinking it was cool that it may actually list downsides, but then you did a sarcastic thing that was annoying. I think you should just be frank - you'll have to purchase and manage servers, you'll be on the hook if they go down and have to get them back up, this is an early product made by one person, etc.

chrisweekly 1y ago
100% agreed on both points.
czhu12 1y ago
Haha, well there goes my attempt to be different from the other landing pages out there. I'll take another stab, but appreciate the feedback!
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  please keep it. it is awesome (and have to be said)! (but add the critical points too)
- harrisreynolds 1y ago
  Yeah... I like this "Why you should not use Canine" section too. I was just on Posthog's site this morning and saw a similar section... https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rky248hgutwzzkzwhifxz/posthog-screenshot.png?rlkey=v9ltrh5k1gjgcoz0dw0coycj4&st=fynernfg&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rky248hgutwzzkzwhifxz/posthog...
  - nwienert 1y ago
    I'm all for doing it, the problem as-is is there are real downsides to something like Canine especially when it's super early like this. Posthog gets away with it because they aren't alpha (and have better humor, amongst other things). I say keep it, just add some honesty there too.

serbuvlad 1y ago

On the webpage at the "Why you should NOT use Canine" section, it is possible to swipe away a card that is in the background, which is very weird UX. Chrome 137. Android 13. Other than that... I'll give it a shot. Have three N100 NUCs. Two are currently unused after failed attempts to learn to use k8s. Maybe this'll do the trick.

wkat4242 1y ago
Yeah the background card swiping is confusing. I understand why it happens but it should not be possible when only a tiny sliver of the card is shown.

Everhusk 1y ago

I've also always wondered why computing costs keep going down but cloud costs keep going up. You deserve an award for building this, thank you.

Everhusk 1y ago

I've always wondered why cloud costs keep going up, while computing costs keep going down. You deserve an award for building this, thank you!

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah in our last year at my previous company, we spent over ~$400k on what amounted to about ~512GB of memory across our fleet of 8 instances on a PaaS vendor. We were almost always memory bound, so I don't even know the compute side. Given that the hardware itself now costs less than 8k to purchase outright, just seemed ridiculous. Albeit we did have SOC2, enterprise plan, etc, but it was a painful bill every quarter.
- bbkane 1y ago
  https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-cloud-exit-savings-will-now-top-ten-million-over-five-years-c7d9b5bd https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-cloud-exit-savings-will-now-to... - this blog post made the rounds last year; makes a similar case

utf_8x 1y ago

Any particular reason why this runs outside the cluster?

dboreham 1y ago
Don't know anything about this project, but usually the reason is "because there could be N clusters", and sometimes "because I want the cluster to come and go frequently" (e.g. for testing workloads).
czhu12 1y ago
Main reason is that I wanted to be able to support single VPS K3s clusters all the way down to ~512MB. K3s already takes up about 100MB which only leaves 400 for the application, so trying to run Canine on that machine would probably create too much bloat.

film42 1y ago

Looks great! I'm definitely in the market for something like this; and building on top of helm charts makes me want to try it out. Can Canine automatically upgrade my helm charts? That would be killer. I usually stay on cloud-hosted paid plans because remembering to upgrade is not fun. The next reason is that I often need to recall the ops knowledge just after I've forgotten it.

czhu12 1y ago
It can apply upgrades but I don't think it solves your core problem, which is how to perform upgrades safely. Most of the time its totally fine, but sometimes a config key changes across versions. Upgrading helm charts without some manual monitoring seems like it might still be an unsolved problem :(

eviluncle 1y ago

So nice to see modern open source being built with rails. it's the ultimate productivity framework

vanillax 1y ago

Can you make it so I can use my existing k8 cluster? or does it have to always use your embedded k3s? It seems like if you are just using k3s it should be easy to bring your own...

czhu12 1y ago
Yep, its intended to be used with k8s clusters, k3s is more of an exceptional usecase but I wanted to be able to support super cheap, single instance machines. I’ll try to make that more clear in the homepage / readme
- vanillax 1y ago
  k3s is kubernetes. K8s == k3s. There is no difference. Just different distributions like linux.

vanillax 1y ago

Nit pick. Kubernetes doesnt run docker containers. It run containers that conform to the Open Container Initiative ( OCI ) . Docker is a licensed brand name.

cmckn 1y ago
Another nit here: https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubernetes-crash-course/introduction https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern... I know this is just a general description, but “10,000 servers” —> Kubernetes actually only claims support up to 5,000 nodes: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-large/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg... Plenty of larger clusters exist, but this usually requires extensive tuning (such as entirely replacing the API registry). And obviously the specific workload plays a large role. Kubernetes is actually quite far from supporting larger clusters out of the box, though most releases include some work in that direction.
- czhu12 1y ago
  Ah yeah I could be wrong. In my early days at Airbnb, I recall someone doing an internal test to prove it could scale to 10k servers, but this was back in 2016 and I wasn't the one doing the test. I'll walk that back
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
cchance 1y ago
Yep i hate when i see docker required id ont run anything with docker anymore just podman and containerd for the most part

TheTaytay 1y ago

First of all, I'm often looking for a better "Heroku-esque" experience on my own metal, so thank you! This looks neat! Also, your docs on how K8s works look really good, and might be the most approachable docs I've seen on the subject. https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubernetes-crash-course/introduction https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern... Question: I assumed when I read the pitch, that I could spin up a managed K8s somewhere, like in Digital Ocean, and use this somehow. But after reading docs and comments, it sounds like this needs to manage my K8s for me? I guess my question is: 1) When I spin up a "Cluster" on Hetzner, is that just dividing up a single machine, or is it a true K8s cluster that spans across multiple machines? 2) If I run this install script on another server, does it join the cluster, giving me true distributed servers to host the pods? 3) Is there a way to take an existing managed K8s and have Canine deploy to it?

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah so at the moment it kind of supports two options: 1. A single Hetzner VPS 2. An existing Kubernetes cluster. I usually use #1 for staging / development apps, and then #2 for production apps. For #2, I manage the number of nodes on the Digital Ocean side, and kubernetes just magically reschedules my workload accordingly (also can turn on auto scaling). I think the thing that you're getting at that is not supported is having Canine create a multi-node cluster directly within Hetzner. There is a terraform to create a Kubernetes cluster from hetzner, but this isn't currently installed on Canine. I'm not closed to trying it out, there were a few UI improvements I wanted to take a shot at first, but at the moment Canine assume's you have a cluster ready to go, or can help you walk through a K3s installation to a single VPS. https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...
- TheTaytay 1y ago
  Oh! This is good news! I was not asking about K8s on Hetzner per se. I was asking if I could spin up a managed cluster (on Digital Ocean, etc) and use this on it. It sounds like I can, which is great! I think I missed that in the docs.

lloydjones 1y ago

I started using Coolify a few months ago — Do you have a “pitch” as to how Canine is different or better? Good work either way!

bitpush 1y ago
Isnt Coolify a Vercel alternative? In that, you dont see any k8s primitives (services, load balancer etc). In my head, I put coolify, vercel as higher in the stack. fly.io, heroku, canine to be closer to metal, and all the on the metal is k8s and friends.
- lloydjones 1y ago
  That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Though I do believe that Coolify will “eventually” support Kubernetes, I think what you’re saying feels right to me.
czhu12 1y ago
Yeah coolify is great, and they’re light years ahead on features. Main difference is that coolify supports mostly single node deployments (I could be wrong about this). A single beefy vps could handle a massive amount of load, but for a lot of orgs, it doesn’t quite meet needs for resiliency, workloads, etc. Canine is built on Kubernetes, so it can take advantage of the entire ecosystem, helm charts, third party add ons, etc. A good example: I was able to deploy Dagster + clickhouse, hosted behind a VPN with telepresence, all with canine, with a few clicks. I think for personal projects, coolify is more than enough though, and probably the better option at the moment. Most of my next year will just be adding features coolify already supports.
- lloydjones 1y ago
  Got it — Thanks for getting back to me!

jambay 1y ago

The interaction design looks fairly intuitive. Good luck!

tiffanyh 1y ago

Isn't Heroku build on Erlang/OTP because it essentially has Kubernetes-like functionality out-of-box.

fuckyah 1y ago

[dead]

tonyhart7 1y ago

this is identical to https://www.kubero.dev/ https://www.kubero.dev/ the problem is that kubero, Idk they did not gain any traction. maybe most user want simple tools like coolify

Terretta 1y ago
> they did not gain any traction. Energy on this project: https://github.com/czhu12/canine/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/czhu12/canine/graphs/code-frequency
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  that's a lot work TODO especially how barebone the project is

yarone 1y ago

This is awesome, great work!

indigodaddy 1y ago

The video example is a little confusing from a "I just want to self host the whole thing on a single machine/VM etc" perspective. If that's what I want to do, do I still have to create a cluster by putting in some managed DO K8s reference? Eg I just want it to use the local VM for the cluster. Do you have some other videos or can you make some that show say how to install it all-in-one on a single machine, and then from there how to add/deploy an app?

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah, so the setup I have there is basically: for staging / non prod apps, I typically just boot a single Hetzner VPS, and then install a K8 compliant server, then I'm off to the races. Production, I usually use digital ocean, so then I get a managed kubernetes, but also a managed postgres within the same data center for latency needs. Let's me sleep easier at night :)
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Gotcha, I just think a big part of your audience will want to one-box it for personal hobbyist apps and projects. Do you have documentation for your staging approach?
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Is RKE2 and/or K3S (eg Rancher products) K8 compliant? (edit, looked it up and Google AI apparently says yes..)

znpy 1y ago

I used heroku manh years ago and i have fond memories of it. I think the landing page fails at answering the two most basic questions: 1. Can i deploy via a stupid simple “git push” ? 2. Can i express what my workloads are via a stupid simple Procfile?

reassess_blind 1y ago

Is there an option to just drag drop project files, instead of using GitHub? That’s how I prefer to test these out.

bravesoul2 1y ago

Brilliant if an entire industry becomes a commodity complement because some angry dev got fed up of paying $400. Love it!

matus_congrady 1y ago

At https://stacktape.com https://stacktape.com, we're also in the same space. We're offering Heroku-like experience on top of your own AWS account. I like what you're doing. But, to behonst, it's a tough market. While the promise of $265 vs $4 might seem like a no-brainer, you're comparing apples to oranges. - Your DX is most likely be far from Heroku's. Their developer experience is refined by 100,000s developers. It's hard to think through everything, and you're very unlikely to make it anywhere close, once you go beyond simple use-cases. - A "single VM" setup is not really production-grade. You're lacking reliability, scalability, redundancy and many more features that these platforms have. It definitely works for low-traffic side-projects. But people or entities that actually have a budget for something like this, and are willing to pay, are usually looking for a different solution. That being said, I wish you all the luck. Maybe things change it the AI-generated apps era.

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah I agree with you, but I think thats why maybe Kubernetes is a good place to work from. It already has a massive API with a pretty large ecosystem, so at the base level, the `kubectl` developer experience is about as good as any could be. K8 also makes it reasonably easy to scale to massive clusters, with good resilience, without too much of a hiccup
hardwaresofton 1y ago
Hey, if you’re going to offer constructive feedback to a competitor, maybe don’t lead with a plug.

federicotdn 1y ago

I can't get Project creation to work. I click on "Deploy from Docker Hub instead →", fill in the details (name, image, cluster), and when I click Submit, I'm taken to the Projects page again (empty). edit: looks like POST https://canine.sh/projects https://canine.sh/projects is returning 422.

czhu12 1y ago
Weird, I'll take a look, guessing theres a permission issue with reaching the docker hub. Is it a private repository? I think last time I tried deploying an image with Dockerhub, the token that was provisioned didn't have read access. At the very least, theres. bug with showing a better error message so I'll do that now!
- federicotdn 1y ago
  Indeed, private repo

the__alchemist 1y ago

Is this simple to deploy to and use like Heroku, or do I need to use docking and kubertenes? I would love a cheaper Heroku!

JeffMcCune 1y ago

Is Google sheets backend (from the screenshot in the readme) what I think it is? Sheets API as a database? If so props to you. My original idea behind https://holos.run https://holos.run was to create a Heorku like experience for k8s so I’m super happy to see this existing in the world. I’d love to explore an integration, potentially spinning up the single or multi node clusters with cluster api.

czhu12 1y ago
Haha yeah exactly, https://google-sheets-backend.canine.sh/ https://google-sheets-backend.canine.sh/ I wondered how easy it would be to vibe code something like this, turns out, super easy

hardwaresofton 1y ago

Congrats on the launch Chris! Product has come a long way

lotyrin 1y ago

Any support (or timeline for support) for what heroku calls "review apps" (PRs automatically become ephemeral staged environment)? Skimming the docs and repo I didn't see any.

czhu12 1y ago
Not yet, was on the roadmap, as well as Gitlab support. I was going to trickle out the updates over the next few weeks

konexis007 1y ago

How does this compare with caprover or dokku?

bpiroman 1y ago

Just use Kamal and deploy to a Hetzner instance

asadawadia 1y ago

How do you handle abuse/malicious user code being run on your server ?

jdsleppy 1y ago
This is for running code on your own servers, he doesn't deal with running others' code.

b0a04gl 1y ago

[dead]

dabbz 1y ago

How do the Addons work? Are they just pre-built Dockerfile s? Or is there more to them? I'd love to request mariadb if there's something special beyond just a dockerfile/docker image.

varun_chopra 1y ago

I think you do need to support being able to add more nodes to the Hetzner install. Then it'd be perfect.

reconnecting 1y ago

Your website stated that license is now 2024 and license is MIT. `© 2024 Canine, Inc. MIT License.` When the ability to display the current year on the webpage is not critical, the difference between the Apache license (as listed on GitHub) and the MIT license (as listed on the website) is more significant concern. What is the actual one?

nylonstrung 1y ago

Does this run k3s?

nodesocket 1y ago

Very cool. How does Caine compare to Portainer? I assume Caine has much easier integrated git push deployment and CI/CD integration.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

I see they're still using the old 2000s-style "dev", "test", "prod" environments. How many developers here are aware that this is a bad pattern? Do you use it even though you know it's a bad pattern, and if so, why?

aloknnikhil 1y ago
Since when did having isolated environments for dev / test and prod become a bad pattern?
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  Since around the time "cattle not pets" philosophy was coined. dev and test are pets, ephemeral environments are cattle.
diamondfist25 1y ago
is it a bad pattern? i'd love to know more cuz im starting on this route for my hetzner k3s setup
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  I hesitate to call it an anti-pattern but it kind of is. It leads you down some bad paths. - In the best possible scenario: 1) you're spending time to duplicate configuration between dev, test, and prod, any time the environments change, 2) you hope your testing in one environment is actually borne out in prod, 3) you are shutting down dev & test when they're not in use (to save money), 4) you rebuild it all regularly to ensure it's still actually repeatable to repair or rebuild it, 5) you do maintenance on all 3 regularly to stay up to date on security patches and dependencies, 6) you still do trunk-based development that just deploys to each environment successively with automated functional tests, which makes one of the environments (either dev or test) unnecessary, and the other inaccurate - In the more likely scenario: 1) your "duplication" of configuration is inaccurate or literally not the same, leading to differences which cause bugs, 2) your results in prod don't mimic those in test, 3) you aren't shutting down dev/test when not in use, leading to not only unnecessary charges, but potential security issues if they get compromised (because who secures dev/test?), 4) you never rebuild it, so when there's an issue and you need to repair or replace it, you have no idea how to do it again, or the automation doesn't work, so you spend more time fixing it while your stuff is down, 5) you never do maintenance, leading to failed disks, out of date software, and general maintenance headaches, 6) you are probably not doing trunk based development, but cherry-picking changes from a "dev", "test", and "prod" branch, ending up with diverging codebases which don't match each other, and is a nightmare to debug and maintain That's the very short version of it, anyway. Thankfully there is a modern method which solves all those problems. Only use ephemeral environments, and production. The ephemeral environment is built from scratch whenever you want to test, and is shut down automatically after idleness. This ensures trunk-based development, allows multiple independent test deployments with specific feature-branch changes to exist simultaneously, re-tests all your automation constantly, uses the latest updates to avoid dependency stagnation, is versioned, saves money and resources, and eliminates security concerns. Faster development, fewer bugs, less money, less maintenance toil, less downtime, more security. But it's not popular on HN so nobody does it.

diamondfist25 1y ago

I just went thru this exercise of setting up k3s on hetzner by using this: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/ https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/ does this help?

serial_dev 1y ago

A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes!? If I need to know what Kubernetes is, Helm charts and whatnot, it's not really a Heroku alternative for me. I understand for some, managing them as basic as running "echo hello", but I don't want to even think about kubernetes and helm charts when I want something up and running very quickly.

czhu12 1y ago
Yeah that was the goal of Canine -- to never have to know that Kubernetes exists, but to still take advantage of its mature ecosystem. And then one day down the line, if you ever do need more powerful features, exposing the Kubernetes API's directly.

whitefang 1y ago

I found Coolify that solved the similar problem.

RamRodification 1y ago

I think there is a typo on "Day #4. Services" in the Kubernetes Crash Course. It says "NodePort services are not accessible to the internet", but I think the point being made is that they are?

mattfrommars 1y ago

OP, what is your background to be in the position to build this? I've been itching to build or have an idea to make something complicated but only true thing I kind of know is building API and integrating with React application. How were you able to deduce complexity into workable item/task to take 'I will alternate to Heroku' into fully functional open source project? I haven't really use Heroku, so to figure out 'feature to be implemented', I would start with pricing page. I am sure my approach is flawed here.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

chrisaiv 1y ago

Are there any charts that can compare this to Dokku, the Open Source equivalent of Heroku?