Comment by czhu12
10 days ago
Been working on an open source, free, Heroku alternative at https://canine.sh for about two years. Its basically a one-click install against a Kubernetes instance to give you a Heroku interface.
I feel like even after all these years we’re still missing the devex that Heroku provided.
Canine basically wraps a Kubernetes cluster -- gives you a heroku like interface to deploy applications to. At some point, if you get big enough that canine is no longer powerful enough, you can just "eject" canine from kubernetes, and continue using kubernetes directly, without having to do any migrations.
Just passed about 2000 developers, at this point most of my work is resolving bug fixes, adding helper text everywhere to make things cleaner, and supporting setups I've never encountered like homelabs with changing IP's
Kubernetes is really powerful, but IMHO, it is the wrong tool here.
It might be the thing you use to power this system, but the benefits of Heroku were precisely that it didn't need you to think about the guts of a system like Kubernetes.
The magic was in the incredibly concise API, and the fact that it "just worked".
1000% agree, the goal of canine is to make it so that you don't have to think about the guts of the system until you want to. Inevitably, companies outgrow the custom-built, closed-sourced, vendor-hosted platforms, but Canine allows you to fall back to Kubernetes.
The thing that inspired me was realizing that all of the current platforms that make it easy to host apps today are built on top of Kubernetes anyways -- they just hide it all from you. I'm hoping Canine gives people an option to self host on their own Kubernetes, and with sensible defaults, get basically as easy to use of an experience.