Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io

Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by doodlesdev on Monday March 06, 2023 @06:00PM (#35049034)

How do Coolify and Dokku compare? I've been aware of Dokku for a long time already, however I've never been confident enough to rely on these interfaces to deploy applications, specially because of their business model to keep things going. I'll have to try them both eventually though, I absolutely hate PaaS honestly, the prices are all just too high, but the convenience is really nice when managing a multitude of services simultaneously.

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by notpushkin on Monday March 06, 2023 @06:54PM (#35049604)

I think overall Coolify is a bit more modern. It uses some different components (e. g. Traefik vs Nginx for reverse proxying), and includes a UI in its basic package (Dokku was CLI only for a long time, now they have Dokku Pro with a Web UI). Otherwise it looks like the architecture is pretty much the same.

Re: business model: both Coolify and Dokku are open source, so even if their development stops, you can continue to use them no matter what. (You do have to pay for your own servers though :-) So it's not a PaaS in the traditional sense (like Fly.io or Heroku), but more like “build your own PaaS” thing.

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by josegonzalez on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:15PM (#35049803)

Dokku maintainer here

For proxying requests, Dokku currently supports:

    - nginx on the host (default)
    - traefik (via docker labels)
    - caddy (via docker labels)
    - haproxy (via docker labels)

We'll also soon support nginx via docker labels, which will work around issues where Docker sometimes assigns random IP addresses (and unlock TCP/UDP proxying as well).

I can't say anything else about Coolify since I haven't used it in a while, but I'd be curious as to what other parts are more modern about Coolify than Dokku.

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by notpushkin on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:28PM (#35049891)

Wow, looks like Dokku got a lot of upgrades since last time I used it thoroughly. I'm wondering though, why support four different proxies?

About the modern part: that was my opinion based on the way I recall Dokku and Coolify, and a quick scroll through the docs of both, so I might be really wrong here! I definitely need to check out both Dokku and Coolify again sometime.

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by josegonzalez on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:36PM (#35049951)

We support 4 different ones to give folks choice. Some folks want/need features that aren't available on one vs the other (traefik has a ton of features, caddy is simple to configure, nginx has a ton of documentation) so it made sense from that perspective. It was also easy to add once I had the pattern going (though the default has stayed nginx).

One of the main features of Dokku is it's extensibility. You can cut one part out and replace it with another quite easily, and proxying is an example of that. I think that flexibility allows folks to use it in more situations than one otherwise would, though at the cost of being more difficult to maintain (and harder to have cohesion between parts of the system at times).

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by josegonzalez on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:12PM (#35049774)

Dokku Maintainer here.

I don't really have a business model. I do take donations from Open Collective (and Github Sponsors, which funnels to OC) and there is Dokku Pro, but those don't collect anywhere near the funds I'd need to stop my dayjob (at least now. Maybe someday?).

My business model is that code releasing is something I'm pretty passionate about. Dokku isn't even originally my project (Jeff Lindsay started it, I just took it over), but I've been working on it for almost a decade. It's open source and fairly simple, so even if something happened to me, others could theoretically continue the project on as desired (or build on top of it if need be).

I'd be interested in hearing any of your other concerns though :)

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by notpushkin on Monday March 06, 2023 @07:20PM (#35049840)

Thank you so much for your tremendous work!

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by doodlesdev on Monday March 06, 2023 @11:37PM (#35051621)

Oh that's really cool to know, wasn't expecting the Dokku maintainer to read my comment LOL. From what I had looked at some time ago I though the project was run with the profits from Dokku pro, although upon further thought I understand that that's probably not enough to keep someone working full-time on it LOL.

I checked the repo and yeah, it checks out, Dokku _is_ pretty manageable with a decently small codebase. Having a low bus factor is really important for me. I'll check it out soon, and hopefully leave a donation to help you keep the project going too :)

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Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io by josegonzalez on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:11AM (#35051823)

Nah Dokku really is mostly a labor of love. Originally I started working on it to provide a Heroku alternative for a group of students that couldn't afford what they needed to on Heroku (this was like... in 2014) and I've since been using it to run all my own stuff and the occasional client install when I do freelance.

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