sst VS Dokku

We see some great results from using these in conjunction with frameworks such as SST or Serverless, and also some real spaghetti from people who organically proliferate 100’s of functions over time and lose track of how they relate to each other or how to update them safely across time and service. Buyer beware!

> But if you have a sufficiently large enough API surface, doing one lambda per endpoint comes with a lot of pain as well. Packaging and deploying all of those artifacts can be very time consuming, especially if you have a naive approach that does a full rebuild/redeploy every time the pipeline runs.

Yeah, thankfully SST [0] does the heavy lifting for me. I've tried most of the solutions out there and SST was where I was the happiest. Right now I do 1 functions per endpoint. I structure my code like url paths mostly, 1 stack per final folder, so that the "users" folder maps to "/users/*" and inside I have get/getAll/create/update/delete files that map to GET X/id, GET X, POST X, POST X/id, DELETE/id. It works out well, it's easy to reason about, and deploys (a sizable a backend) in about 10min on GitHub Actions (which I'm going to swap out probably for something faster).

I agree with the secrets/permissions aspect and I like that it's stupid-simple for me to attach secrets/permissions at a low level if I want.

I use NodeJS and startup isn't horrible and once it's up the requests as very quick. For my needs, an the nature of the software I'm writing, lambda makes a ton of sense (mostly never used, but when it's used it's used heavily and needs to scale up high).

[0] https://sst.dev

We will start by building a project with SST that provisions an API Gateway, a Lambda, and an S3 bucket. Once implemented, we'll look into testing for concurrent write conflicts or exceeding capacity limits.

I recently deployed a node websocket server using the SST Service construct. Until this point my stack had been functions and buckets. While I had no users 😢, I also had no costs 🤡.

Most my personal and side-business projects have very spiky load or just low load in general. Because of that I love using AWS Lambda as my backend since it scales to 0 and scales to whatever you have your limits set at.

I use SST [0] for my backend with NodeJS (TypeScript) and Vue (Quasar) for my frontend. For my database I use either Postgres or DynamoDB if the fit is right (Single Table Design is really neat). For Postgres I like Neon [1] though their recent pricing changes make it less appealing.

[0] https://sst.dev

[1] https://neon.tech

Yup. Entire core business product for a succeeding startup, though it's a small team of contributors (<10), and a much smaller platform team. Serverless backend started in 2018. Been a blessing in many regards, but it has its warts (often related to how new this architecture is, and of course we've made our own mistakes along the way).

I really like the model of functions decoupled through events. Big fan of that. It's very flexible and iterative. Keep that as your focus and it's great. Be careful of duplicating config, look for ways to compose/reuse (duh, but definitely a lesson learnt) and same with CI, structure your project so it can use something off-the-shelf like serverless-compose. Definitely monorepo/monolith it, I'd be losing my mind with 100-150 repos/"microservices" with a team this size. If starting now I'd maybe look at SST framework[0] because redeploying every change during development gets old fast

I couldn't go back to any other way to be honest, for cloud-heavy backends at least. By far the most productive I've ever been

Definitely has its warts though, it's not all roses.

[0] http://sst.dev

Along the way, you find an excellent framework, SST. Which is much faster than CDK and provides a better DX1. Here is how you then define your MultiPipelineStack.

SST is a powerful framework that simplifies the development of serverless applications. It offers a straightforward and opinionated approach to defining serverless apps using TypeScript. Built on top of AWS CDK, SST handles the complexity of setting up your serverless infrastructure automatically. SST is an open-source framework and is completely free to use.

SST is an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development and deployment of Serverless stacks on AWS. It operates under the hood by integrating with Amazon CDK. However, its primary benefit is in allowing us to concentrate on creating resources using familiar languages like TypeScript, treating them as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

If you want to dig into it anyways, Dokku is an interesting mention. They provide an Open Source PaaS that you can install on your server to simplify self hosting containers.

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.