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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Let me guess ... it's called serverless but it still has a server somewhere in the equation?

Most of the time I see "serverless" used these days, it's referring to the fact that server specifics are abstracted away from the application itself's deployment artifacts. Instead it just runs on a platform of some kind without worrying about having to be built for this version of this OS, etc.

While it is being used a bit recklessly here, taking it literally is about as insightful and constructive to discussion as pointing out that "cloud" servers are located on the ground.

I would even defend its usage here by pointing out that it's entirely possible to use this at a company in which the servers are managed by one person or team, and the developers building applications simply interact with the service and never touch a server themselves. Neither team has to touch each others scope, making it indistinguishable from conventional "serverless" approaches in which the decoupling occurs across company rather than across team within one company.

> without worrying about having to be built for this version of this OS, etc.

Maybe call it "server-agnostic" or "OS-agnostic" then.

I honestly don't see the need to change it. The first use of "serverless" is from this article:

https://readwrite.com/why-the-future-of-software-and-apps-is...

In it, he points out:

>The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think that much about them.

I don't know how anyone could interpret "serverless" as meaning there's no server involved at any point in the application's execution, and if they did, I'm not sure what harm it causes? It seems like the only objection here is a pedantic urge to be more correct.

Can we not do this? Everyone knows that “serverless” doesn’t actually mean there are no servers. It’s not productive to do this “haha gotcha!” trope every time someone uses the serverless term.

Serverless refers to the fact that you can launch individual workloads on the platform while abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. Yes, to set up dokku you still need to provision a server. But to deploy an application onto dokku after it’s been set up, you do that without worrying about provisioning new infra for your app. That’s what is “serverless” about it, and it’s a perfectly acceptable use of the term.

"Serverless" means 1- pay for what you use. 2- No infra setup, ever. Dokku requires a server that you have to manage. It is not serverless. You should never hit a scaling wall.

Azure Functions are serverless to us, but for the team developing and deploying that feature they are not serverless. Dokku provides a tool so that once you deploy projects they can be ‘serverless’.

1- That would throw out serverless with (free) unlimited use (A la PocketHost)

2- Then getting a third party to set up Dokku and then using that would qualify (Because it'd be the same as getting AWS to setup their server abstraction) The platform is serverless, you hosting it probably not, maybe server-light, as you setup the abstraction and use that for many apps

> Can we not do this? Everyone knows that “serverless” doesn’t actually mean there are no servers.

Then maybe people shouldn't use a term that means "there are no servers". One doesn't get to complain if they use a word to mean something the opposite of its actual meaning, and then people don't like it.

The actual meaning of words is defined by how people use them. Serverless has a very specific, well-defined meaning despite its seemingly contradictory etymology.

Are you the sort of person that says "ackshewelly people in orbit aren't weightless" or complains that wireless headphones technically contain wires, or that motionless rocks are actually moving really fast because the Earth is moving through space...

It's just annoying.

Dokku doesn't mention "serverless" anywhere, it's just this persons blog post that uses this word wrongly.

It is, but "We provide a programmatic interface for deployment that allows deploying docker containers on a VPS or server that you control" doesn't have a good buzzword.

Feel free to point us to the computing paradigm that doesn't require execution on some host

> Dokku is an open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that runs on a single server of your choice

Lol

This is the part that gets me every time. It sounds pretty neat, but.. if it only works on one server - what's the point?

What about things like scaling, or even just what if your one server runs out of resources to fit more apps on?

It‘s a tradeoff: a real PaaS is more managed, fault tolerant, and scalable, Dokku is much less expensive, especially with multiple projects.

One server scales vertically and can serve a good number of projects and users. Huge spikes eg. due to attacks, lead to outages instead of runaway bills.

> What about things like scaling

Premature optimization for 99% of people's projects. Once you run into "scaling" issues you can always run it on a more powerful server.

>what's the point

To get started in a simpler way, and in a way that solves 80% of use cases. Once you need to scale, then you can scale. Why worry about that upfront with all the complexity it entails?

>what if your one server runs out of resources to fit more apps on

There's vertical scaling. Rent a bigger server.

We've supported multiple servers for a few years and have had official k3s support since the beginning of the year, so not just one server anymore. We even support managing the servers associated in a k3s-based cluster.

Disclaimer: I am the Dokku maintainer.

Ohhh, I stand corrected. I don't think that was an option the last time I looked at Dokku. I see the schedulers section in the docs now, thanks for pointing it out!

Does the k3s scheduler work with existing non-k3s k8s clusters as well?

Yep, you can set a single property for the kubeconfig and it'll respect that.

You can still solve for that just fine in a multi-Dokku setup. It's just that Dokku won't do the coordination for you. Sometimes you do want something more integrated like k8s/openshift/nomad instead; sometimes not.

Dokku's multi-server offering is based on k3s. We interact with k3s but offload any actual clustering to k3s itself as it does the job better than Dokku could :) You can also just tie Dokku into an existing K8s cluster on your favorite cloud provider instead.

Disclaimer: I am the Dokku maintainer.

This sounds like a great approach! Thank you for keeping it up and on!

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