For those missing Heroku: there exists Dokku [1], a small Heroku-like implementation for container management. It uses the same underlying buildpacks and you get the same comfort as with Heroku. And it's free to use. You can't deploy to multiple host machines though. But for small projects that fit on a single host, it's very nice to use.

[1] http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

Tried Dokku, but found CapRover [1] to be a much better / easier option

[1] https://caprover.com/

Looks great! considering migrating from dokku. I also came across exoframe recently which looks lower level but works with your existing docker projects https://github.com/exoframejs/exoframe

Better for what reason?

It seems Dokku wins at "easier" since in many cases, you can just push the application code you used for development and the required stack is automatically detected. Adding a database is two commands. No need to know Dockerfiles.

It's easier because for many cases you don't even need to search the document ro know what command to run to fire up a database. You just select it from a GUI list.

Looks interesting - but the installation instructions put me off a bit. Open a port on your server, and don't change the default password `captain42` - then run a cli tool from your dev machine.

I'll look more into it, but it didn't really inspire confidence.

You can choose a custom password during installation

I just don't understand why you can't change the password (or even better, choose a certificate) before you open the ports to the world.

> Also, we run a VPC-only K3s node for some simple internal tools that works great as well.

We do exactly the same thing! We have a one-node k8s for all these dev things that just works. Everything is containerized for local dev anyway so moving it to k8s was just writing the deployment manifest.

On heroku, all of these would be separate dynos (or one glued-together dyno that does everything). On a self-hosted VM we'd have to deal with managing that.

I liked this approach so much that I now have a small 1-node personal cluster that hosts all of my private hobby projects that aren't ready for prime time yet, that were on heroku previously. Costs me only $10 + (persistent storage + IP address if needed)

I feel like I’m witnessing two co-founding colleagues - who sit by each other day in and day out - discover the other’s persona on HackerNews.

Sure, maybe you two (@dvcrn and @arcticfox) don’t work together and don’t know each other, but it’s definitely more entertaining imagining the scenario above.

“If you like pina coladas...”

You really should write an article detailing how all this is set up. It sounds fascinating.

Heroku is also very cheap on the low end. EKS costs at least $72/mo before adding compute & storage. That would get you a lot of dynos.

I’m a bit dubious in the Heroku-is-less-secure-than-k8s claims

for 2 person project dokku is the smartest choice