Dokku VS porter

When I came across Coolify, I thought of giving it a try. I am aware of Dokku, but I never really tried it because it doesn't have a UI. I work primarily as a UI developer, so having a nice UI to work with is a plus for me.

I run all my projects on Dokku. It’s a sweet spot for me between a barebones VPS with Docker Compose and something a lot more complicated like k8s. Dokku comes with a bunch of solid plugins for databases that handle backups and such. Zero downtime deploys, TLS cert management, reverse proxies, all out of the box. It’s simple enough to understand in a weekend and has been quietly maintained for many years. The only downside is it’s meant mostly for single server deployments, but I’ve never needed another server so far.

https://dokku.com/

Yeah there are a bunch of selfhostable things:

Caprover (https://caprover.com/)

Dokku (https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

But people still choose Netlify and Vercel for ease of use I think.

Maybe we need something that's just Netlify. The closest I've seen to the "right" UX is Ness:

https://ness.sh

The modern iteration of these tools has taken the developer experience learnings from the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category, and will bring them to your own VM, giving you your own personal PaaS. Example of this include Dokku, Coolify, Caprover, Cloud66 and many more!

Based on the fact that your ideal is to have a similar experience to heroku than managing your own server setting up reverse proxies take a look at these options:

1) https://dokku.com - lets you turn your light sail instance basically into heroku

2) https://render.com

3) https://fly.io

4) If you have aws credits this is their heroku equivalent: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk

above is not what I do but would be the options I would pursue if I understand your preference and requirement correctly.

All in all, I really recommend trying out Dokku if you are a developer interested in hosting your own projects. It makes it super easy to get everything you need to get up and running without having to worry about the specifics. And the price is impossible to beat!

The installation instructions are on the frontpage of our site. Thats basically all you need to do to install Dokku. As far as using it, we have a simplified tutorial here.

Dokku is a lightweight and open-source PaaS platform that simplifies application deployment by leveraging Docker. With Dokku, developers can easily push their applications using Git, allowing Dokku to build and run them in isolated containers. Its CLI-only approach and plugin architecture make it highly extensible. Dokku's modular plugins enable features like database integration, Let's Encrypt SSL certificates, and automated Slack notifications, giving developers flexibility and control over their PaaS environment.

Also https://dokku.com/

Hi HN, this is Trevor and Justin from Porter (https://porter.run). We first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product, which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS. (original launch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421).

We’re excited to show you something new - we’ve built Porter Cloud (https://porter.run/porter-cloud), a hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) that you can eject from. It works just like conventional PaaS’s that deploys your apps with a few clicks, but it lets you eject to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you scale.

Since launching Porter in 2021, we helped migrate a lot of companies from a PaaS to AWS, Azure, and GCP. Most of these companies had gotten started on these platforms in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to one of the big three cloud providers as they scaled and outgrew the original platform.

Interestingly, we learned that many startups that deploy on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to the big three clouds at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a champagne problem when they're focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very real problem when you start running into technical constraints and it is difficult to migrate your production environment while serving users.

We’ve built Porter Cloud so you can deploy the earliest versions of the product as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can eject to the tried and true hyperscalers later. When you need to eject, you can follow a few simple steps to migrate your workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud with minimal downtime.

If you’re curious how it works, please drop your questions below. And if you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to it!

Yep, we're backed by YC in the W24 batch - this is evident on our landing page [1].

We're both second time CTOs and we've been on both sides of this, as consumers of and creators of OSS. I was previously a co-founder and CTO of Porter [2], which had an open-core model. There are two risks that most companies think about in the open core model:

1. Big companies using your platform without contributing back in some way or buying a license. I think this is less of a risk, because these organizations are incentivized to buy a support license to help with maintenance, upgrades, and since we sit on a critical path, with uptime.

2. Hyperscalers folding your product in to their offering [3]. This is a bigger risk but is also a bit of a "champagne problem".

Note that smaller companies/individual developers are who we'd like to enable, not crowd out. If people would like to use our cloud offering because it reduces the headache for them, they should do so. If they just want to run our service and manage their own PostgreSQL, they should have the option to do that too.

Based on all of this, here's where we land on things:

1. Everything we've built so far has been 100% MIT licensed. We'd like to keep it that way and make money off of Hatchet Cloud. We'll likely roll out a separate enterprise support agreement for self hosting.

2. Our cloud version isn't going to run a different core engine or API server than our open source version. We'll write interfaces for all plugins to our servers and engines, so even if we have something super specific to how we've chosen to do things on the cloud version, we'll expose the options to write your own plugins on the engine and server.

3. We'd like to make self-hosting as easy to use as our cloud version. We don't want our self-hosted offering to be a second-class citizen.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

[1] https://hatchet.run

[2] https://github.com/porter-dev/porter

[3] https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws

Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run) here - Porter is a platform that brings that easy PaaS experience to a k8s cluster that's running in your own cloud account (and manages it for you so you don't have to).

We are offering a credit program for early stage startups that you can apply for here, happy to fast track your application! https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups

Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run) here - we do not use Terraform under the hood. We moved away from an IaC based system earlier this year to better manage our users' infrastructure distributed across multiple cloud accounts. A decision that definitely turned out to be conveniently prescient :)

With this new system, we are also able to immediately reconcile drifts that occur in our user's infrastructure, which an IaC based system did not allow us to do.

Aptible hosts (and pays for) AWS resources on your behalf, similar to Heroku/Render/Railway. Last year, we built support for integrating Aptible into your own AWS account, but only a handful of existing customers are currently using that, and it's not available in the product by default. I'd be interested to learn why you prefer this model. If you're willing to chat about it, my email is in my profile.

Alternatively, have you checked out other PaaS-in-your-own-IaaS solutions like:

- https://porter.run/

- https://www.flightcontrol.dev/

- https://coolify.io/ (OSS, not managed)

These might not meet all your needs, and I think they're all relatively new.

Porter (YC S20) | Full Time | Full-Stack Engineer | NYC or Remote | https://porter.run

Hey HN, I'm Alexander, co-founder of Porter. We're building Heroku in your own cloud - we let users link up their own AWS/GCP, point to the code they want to run, and then put the rest of the hosting process on autopilot (CI/CD, SSL, autoscaling, zero downtime deploys, infra monitoring, etc).

We're hiring NYC-based or remote engineers that are passionate about building tools for developers. As we're a fast-growing seed-stage startup, you should be comfortable with regularly shifting priorities and iterating at a very high (daily) velocity.

Tech stack: Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes, AWS

If you'd like to take a look at our codebase, we're open source - check it out at https://github.com/porter-dev/porter.

Open positions:

- Kubernetes Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/45970

- Full-stack Engineer: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716

Please apply by sending an email to jobs [at] porter [dot] run or applying through https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43716.

https://porter.run is managed kubernetes on your own cloud with all the scaling built in. In theory, you could run this on your own cloud provider, and stay entirely within EU

How does this compare against https://porter.run/ ?

Honestly you should checkout open source + self-host alternatives like porter (https://github.com/porter-dev/porter). I tried it in a project before and the developer experience was surprisingly good.