Dokku is definitely an awesome project (pretty much anything from Jeff Lindsay is pretty good)! The primary problem is that dokku is meant for just 1 service and we have quite a few.

We'd love to see one standard too. Personally, I think it's good to have a lot of competing solutions right now (ECS vs Kubernetes, Docker vs Rocket, etc) and we'll see things settle in the next couple of years as containerization becomes more common.

Not exactly sure what you mean by its meant for just 1 service? Do you mean just one box? I run multiple services/apps on my dokku instance

He means multiple instances - for scaling horizontally when traffic increases.

That's still all on one machine; Dokku can't automatically schedule & distribute containers/processes across a cluster of hosts like Empire & others can. If you're doing anything non trivial you're going to outgrow one machine pretty soon :)

If your app is 12-factor, why can't you just spin up more instances of your app on Dokku?

http://www.openshift.org/ or http://cloudfoundry.org/index.html, both used in production by f500 companies

Cloud Foundry requires a ton of (compute) overhead to get set up. It's very much intended for large projects. Hell, you need a separate VM just to install it.

For anyone looking at a Dokku alternative, Cloud Foundry isn't one.

Openshift is nice though.

Actually it's quite possible to run a full Cloud Foundry environment in a single VM, as seen with Stackato (http://www.stackato.com/), which can then be scaled out as necessary.

> Hell, you need a separate VM just to install it.

I'm not sure why that's a problem. If you want something that's actually like heroku like in terms of uptime and what not, you need something that can manage the health of the cluster. Dokku's cool, but it doesn't make sense for anything you actually need to depend on. If it doesn't make sense to pay for the overhead of running your own paas, just use Heroku instead.

Heroku isn't cheap. And to run a small PaaS like alternative there are many many more solutions that are way better and faster and more secure than Cloud Foundry. Hell I mean did you even read the requirements of Cloud Foundry, it takes a hell lot of everything just to manage a few boxes. Also CF comes from Pivotal, listen to the talks they made, they say, start out small, however starting out small with CF is just impossible.

And OpenShift ist great, especially Origin M5 which is coming, soon tm.

"are way better and faster and more secure than Cloud Foundry"

Like how? Better, okay it's in the eye of the beholder. But secure? Faster? Shenanigans.

IF you want to just get started with Cloud Foundry, you install Lattice, it's one VM. In an HA setup (not the target but possible), it's 5 VMs.

Cloud foundry is about 20 VMs, and is what happens when you say "and then I want..." About 5 times: multi tenancy, role based access control, auto recovery health management, service brokerage, multiple DNS domains, app staging, etc. wherein people will otherwise just build on their own ...

Lattice is a more minimalist approach, for those who desire the production hardened core of Cloud Foundry but prefer to bring their own PaaS components or simply experiment.

http://lattice.cf/

And there is dokku-alt. https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt

That project is not really maintained anymore, and it is nothing more then dokku with a bunch of plugins preinstalled. I would suggest just using dokku and installing the plugins you need. Dokku has moved forward in their API and stuff a lot since dokku-alt was forked and the documentation for dokku does not really apply to dokku-alt.