With the recent big reductions in AWS costs, and Heroku not helping pass that savings on to their users, I'm looking for a new platform to move my apps to. It would be nice to have something very heroku like.

Very excited to see how this project progresses. It appears to be right in line with what I need right now. I've standardized my app architecture on Docker, but have not had the time to mature the instance management and deployment process.

I'm currently using capistrano, but it's feeling limited for my use case as I have to manage several "always running" servers plus hundreds of cpu intensive workers. Finding a good way to manage those workers across several cloud platforms and my own hardware has not been simple.

Thanks. Well fingers crossed it matures in the right direction. I'd hope that it'll become a simple solution to just throw up on a VPS and get apps deployed without the fuss of managing Apache, Virtualhosts, PHP/Ruby/Node/etc binaries, databases and whatnot. I like to think of Peas as the next logical step up from Dokku.

To be fair Deis already does a good job of this.

One issue with Deis is that it depends on Chef Server. As an admin, I've happily left that whole model far behind. For me that single dependency is a deal breaker.

Me too - dependency on Chef Server is instant no-go.

Deis certainly does. http://deis.io/

Speaking of Heroku-like deployments, is there something I can install on a blank DigitalOcean VPS and have it configure a simple PostgreSQL instance and whatever dependancies I have in my Gemfile?

Then I can deploy with a single command?

I have done this a ton of times with Capistrano but it's always a pain in the ass for new projects because I need to install Nginx, PostgreSQL, RVM, Ruby version, etc etc etc. Lots of busywork I don't really care about.

You can basically do this with the "building" gem: https://github.com/CenturyLinkLabs/building

It uses Heroku buildpacks to build self-contained containers with all your dependencies with one command: building containername

Dokku is great, and has a PG plugin:

https://github.com/progrium/dokku

https://github.com/Kloadut/dokku-pg-plugin

DO has a Dokku vm you can select when you spin up a new droplet.

Chef-solo is probably more up your alley. You should be able to easily find recipes for Postgres, Nginx, RVM/rbenv, etc. to automate the building of the server.

Try https://www.cloud66.com/, it does what you want, but for some money.

Cloud66 is kind of incredible, I was an early beta tester for them and they really are hitting an interesting price/value point wrt managing complex systems.

This is really awesome, let me know if you want some credit to test building it on DigitalOcean support, john@