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Comment by efilife | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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!

> 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.

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'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.

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