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Is there proper tutorial for people who have never used heroku? I just don't know how to use this because i dont have any experience with heroku.

I'm interesting in self-hosted AWS api compatible solutions.

Parse is also interesting. In fact I discovered that there is a whole new world outside AWS and DO. It no longer makes sense for me to run weekend projects on AWS outright, thats really for large enterprise applications.

What I would love is to be able to deploy my docker images on my "own"cloud running on a dozen droplets/VPS around the world and bill my users at the same rate that AWS is charging. I figure I would be able to undercut AWS significantly with this method.

Storing 2TB on AWS was price shock for me, makes no sense when there are dedicated servers with a ton of storage and bandwidth that I could just use instead of being "serverless".

However, I find it to be a hall of mirrors, wondering if anybody on HN has been in my shoes and how they are handling it. I guess my biggest concerns:

- uptime availability (can I promise close to AWS?)

- security (how do i harden my box/selfcloud and have peace of mind?)

- IAM type of roles/permissions (how do i emulate something like IAM for my team?)

Like the billing from AWS is getting to a point where I feel like we can use bunch of droplets behind some "selfcloud" that manages all these things for me. I'm sure a solution exists, I just often have trouble recalling their names. Dokku makes it easy to remember because it sorta rhymes with Heroku.

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- I've answered this elsewhere, but your uptime is defined by your host uptime (and any mechanisms for backup/restore you have setup). Some hosting providers (AWS/GCP) provide migration of hosts that die, some have block storage (Azure/AWS/DO/GCP), while others (Rackspace) provide backups of specific directories. As with anything you run and maintain, very heavy YMMV here, but I'm happy to answer questions[2] specific to your needs. - Dokku runs very few/no persistent binaries (atm only an optional event-listener that restarts apps if it detects a web container has changed it's IP address), so the attack vectors are your app and anything else you are running that exposes ports externally (SSH is the big one). I defer to others on container security, but our default Herokuish (and Pack) images are built to run processes as non-root users, so that should provide _some_ level of isolation. Container security is a big space, so I don't want to write something here that will be outdated in three seconds or is just plain wrong. If you have concerns about specific things in the project, please get in touch[2]. - I've used metadataproxy[3] to lock down IAM roles on a per-app basis (with a custom plugin injecting the correct container env var for each app). If you need to lock apps to specific users, there is the community dokku-acl[4] plugin. I'm also working on team management support in Dokku Pro[5] which will be a bit more familiar to users of Heroku. - I know of a few users using our kubernetes plugin[6] (automated via terraform) against mostly default Kubernetes clusters in Digitalocean and AWS. If the Dokku host dies, they just lose the ability to deploy, but can restore access fairly quickly. Everything else just kinda lives out there on their cluster.

- [1] Official tutorial: https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/application-deployment/ - [2] Ways to get in touch: https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/where-to-get-help/ - [3] metadataproxy: https://github.com/lyft/metadataproxy - [4] dokku-acl: https://github.com/dokku-community/dokku-acl - [5] Dokku Pro: https://pro.dokku.com/ - [6] Kubernetes Scheduler plugin: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes