Ok, after a good amount of research I've made a decision: Kamal it is. Dokku, Caprover, Coolify, etc are quite powerful but I've realized I don't need 99% of the features offered.
I thought about the absolute core of my use case and it's: deploy and run a web api behind a reverse proxy, deploy and run scheduled jobs, ship logs to grafana, avoid downtime and manual tasks when deploying.
Kamal supports all of that just fine with Traefik as the reverse proxy, Vector as a stateless accessory service for log shipping, and linux's builtin crontab utility for scheduled work.
Because some might find this interesting: while the postgres upgrade tool in Dokku appears nice when you read the docs, upon further investigation it only handles minor upgrades which are trivial anyway (all you need to do is update the image version and restart the container with the same data mounted) - major ones still need to be done manually with a DB dump so it doesn't provide much value.
To that end, I may deploy Postgres myself as an accessory service with Kamal and script out major upgrades as needed, but I don't really need to worry about hosting Postgres myself because I found a managed provider (Aiven) with a free tier (5GB disk, 1 cpu, 1GB RAM) that's more than good enough for what I need right now.
In other news:
Thanks in part to @marc, the newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer of Kamal Handbook Enterprises, Inc: I have pulled the trigger on the patron copy of Josef's book!
Give this man a raise and a c-suite title. He's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
(Also, bought this because I already told @strzibny in person that I would buy it when I was getting more serious about moving off AWS and I am a man of my word 😎)
Thanks to everyone who responded, very helpful discussion.
Thanks a lot Ben! Kamal Handbook Enterprises hmmm do I need to do some hiring now and scale it to the moon? 😂 And nice find with Aiven, didn't know about them.
Ok, after a good amount of research I've made a decision: Kamal it is. Dokku, Caprover, Coolify, etc are quite powerful but I've realized I don't need 99% of the features offered.
I thought about the absolute core of my use case and it's: deploy and run a web api behind a reverse proxy, deploy and run scheduled jobs, ship logs to grafana, avoid downtime and manual tasks when deploying.
Kamal supports all of that just fine with Traefik as the reverse proxy, Vector as a stateless accessory service for log shipping, and linux's builtin crontab utility for scheduled work.
Because some might find this interesting: while the postgres upgrade tool in Dokku appears nice when you read the docs, upon further investigation it only handles minor upgrades which are trivial anyway (all you need to do is update the image version and restart the container with the same data mounted) - major ones still need to be done manually with a DB dump so it doesn't provide much value.
To that end, I may deploy Postgres myself as an accessory service with Kamal and script out major upgrades as needed, but I don't really need to worry about hosting Postgres myself because I found a managed provider (Aiven) with a free tier (5GB disk, 1 cpu, 1GB RAM) that's more than good enough for what I need right now.
In other news:
Thanks in part to @marc, the newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer of Kamal Handbook Enterprises, Inc: I have pulled the trigger on the patron copy of Josef's book!
Give this man a raise and a c-suite title. He's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
(Also, bought this because I already told @strzibny in person that I would buy it when I was getting more serious about moving off AWS and I am a man of my word 😎)
Thanks to everyone who responded, very helpful discussion.
Thanks a lot Ben! Kamal Handbook Enterprises hmmm do I need to do some hiring now and scale it to the moon? 😂 And nice find with Aiven, didn't know about them.