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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Why does the title say “serverless” though? AFAIK Dokku is very much a “server platform”.

Here's a better question. For people that roll their eyes at the mere mention of "serverless" (like me), what is the value proposition of Dokku over VMs and your own dockers?

Don't convince me it is like AWS serverless. Convince me to give up VMs and docker images.

> Convince me to give up VMs and docker images.

I am in the same boat. Using VMs and docker images and not sure how this would benefit me.

I have looked AWS serverless stuff. They appears to solve problems I don't have.

Exactly.

Dokku looks great but what is the value of using it over "run your container" platforms like Google Cloud Run, Digital Ocean App Platform, or Fargate.

In terms of money it might end up cheaper for the infra itself (especially if it runs in your garage)

In term of your personal time, well, you'll not grow a business on it without hiring people to maintain it or spend a lot of time doing devops

One benefit for me was that a vps with 2vcors and 2-4gig of ram is about the same price as one of these app engine services. So I can run 3 or 4 dokku apps including Postgres, redis, memcache connected to them on my own vps and still have margin when inspiration strikes. I moved a production app from heroku to dokku and saved hundreds a month and still got tons and tons more compute.

Well its problem is that you still have to... install the entire thing. Whatever serverless means, it should allow programmers to focus on their code, not on the platform. Like, at all.

It’s the backend that implements serverless architecture. A serverless server, I guess. Roll your eyes if you like, but “serverless” is still a snappier term than “declarative on-demand server provisioning, configuration, and scaling” and most people are into that whole brevity thing.

> snappier term than “declarative on-demand server provisioning, configuration, and scaling”

Quoth the raven, “servermore”…

Except Dokku doesn't do those things. Dokku doesn't scale your app automatically and it doesn't shut it off when it's not being used. It runs your web server process continuously, handles some 12 factor config, and does some nginx stuff for you. Until this year it didn't support managing a cluster at all and was entirely focused on single box deploys. The scale command just runs more processes on the same machine which if you're not using Node is probably not even a good idea to do.

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