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This is a great opportunity to get HN's take on these tools: systems to streamline the management of containerized services deployed on self-managed hardware.

This is a great opportunity to get HN's take on these tools: systems to streamline the management of containerized services deployed on self-managed hardware. We've been running both CapRover and Coolify for a couple years. We quite like renting real dedicated servers (Hetzner, OVH), it is so much cheaper than the cloud and a minor management burden. These tools make it easy to bridge the gap and treat these physical servers like PaaS. We have dozens of apps and services deployed on a couple large-ish servers with backups. Most modern back-ends do so little computationally and lots of containers can comfortably live together. 128GB of RAM and 64 cores can go a long way and surprisingly cheap in Hetzner, and having that fixed monthly cost removes a mental burden. It is cheap, simple and availability issues are so much rarer than people expect, maybe a couple mishaps a year that are easy to recover from and don't really have a meaningful impact for a startup. Coolify feels more complete and mature, but frankly, after using both a lot, we now steer more towards the simplicity of CapRover. I see that Dokploy is also a major alternative to Coolify, don't know much about it. How does /dev/push compare? Do you have any other recommendations in this vein? Or differing opinions on the tools I mentioned?

hunvreus 1y ago
/dev/push is really trying to recreate the UX of Vercel, so more user-friendly/prettier than CapRover..? Additionally, for most cases you can select a runtime and deploy your app without any Docker config. Easier to get up and running if all you care about is deploy a Python/Go/Node.js app with simple requirements. I do plan on offering the ability to use custom Docker images soon though.
jokethrowaway 1y ago
I haven't tried /dev/push but I don't like these solutions, you always run into some limit and having a fancy ui is overrated. I bit the bullet and started deploying on k3s; k9s is my fancy UI. Machines are cattle, I can have as many nodes as I want. If I need to do something new usually there is a helm chart for it or a .yaml solution somewhere on the internet. I have a lot of control, I've already seen a decent amount of problems, so I just copy paste from old projects. I don't think k3s would do great on 5$ machines with 1GB of RAM but Oracle Always Free gives you 6GB and Hetzner has beefy machines for 35$. The infra people I work with (mid-large size companies) are cool with k8s on any big cloud so my work experience doesn't change much.
Banou 1y ago
Have tried almost every PaaS and same for me, I always come back to CapRover, it's the platform I've had the less issues with, it's simple and yet feature complete enough for me to run almost anything. I'd love a better alternative if possible.

hunvreus 1y ago

/dev/push is really trying to recreate the UX of Vercel, so more user-friendly/prettier than CapRover..? Additionally, for most cases you can select a runtime and deploy your app without any Docker config. Easier to get up and running if all you care about is deploy a Python/Go/Node.js app with simple requirements. I do plan on offering the ability to use custom Docker images soon though.

jokethrowaway 1y ago

I haven't tried /dev/push but I don't like these solutions, you always run into some limit and having a fancy ui is overrated. I bit the bullet and started deploying on k3s; k9s is my fancy UI. Machines are cattle, I can have as many nodes as I want. If I need to do something new usually there is a helm chart for it or a .yaml solution somewhere on the internet. I have a lot of control, I've already seen a decent amount of problems, so I just copy paste from old projects. I don't think k3s would do great on 5$ machines with 1GB of RAM but Oracle Always Free gives you 6GB and Hetzner has beefy machines for 35$. The infra people I work with (mid-large size companies) are cool with k8s on any big cloud so my work experience doesn't change much.

Banou 1y ago

Have tried almost every PaaS and same for me, I always come back to CapRover, it's the platform I've had the less issues with, it's simple and yet feature complete enough for me to run almost anything. I'd love a better alternative if possible.