canine

I've been slowly working on https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine for about 2 years now. Basically a self hosted, FOSS that turns a Kubernetes cluster into something as easy to use as Heroku. Its grown to about 2000 active developers using it host small things at https://canine.sh It was a pain point from a start up I cofounded before where we needed Kubernetes flexibility but developers hated using it. I figured there was no reason why it had to be hard to use and thus Canine was born. Lately been playing around with setting up remote dev containers on your own compute as well -- basically like github codespaces, except self hosted. Built in Rails + Stimulus

I've been slowly working on https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine for about 2 years now. Basically a self hosted, FOSS that turns a Kubernetes cluster into something as easy to use as Heroku. It was a pain point from a start up I cofounded before where we needed Kubernetes flexibility but developers hated using it. I figured there was no reason why it had to be hard to use and thus Canine was born.

I found the exact same when I started vibe coding new features in https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine Claude is super good as making it seem like it’s an expert in kubernetes, but then undercovering certain decisions, it’s basically optimizing to try to make things look like they work. An example is, i wanted to develop a feature to easily fork a managed Postgres database with a k8s cluster. The thing it did was to copy the entirety of the source db to localhost, then copy it back out to the cluster, rather than just running the job within the cluster. Now I’m pretty stressed after a 1 hour vibe coding session, having to now review and digest and think through the code that it wrote. Implementations like that scare me — if I accidentally missed it and merged it — since there are real people who rely on canine. I wouldn’t go as far as to sa

The code for the MCP implementation is here: https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine/blob/main/app/controllers... for anyone curious. Sticking with standard Kubernetes API patterns, the model has a pretty good intuition about how to traverse and debug applications, fetch logs, scale services, debug networking, etc.

Just a heads-up: The footer of https://canine.sh/ says the project is MIT licensed, but the GitHub site at https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine says the project is Apache 2.0 licensed. I'm not sure how to reconcile that, but the project seems really interesting, either way.

Currently working on an open source Heroku / Fly.io / Render alternative: https://canine.sh Its built on top of Kubernetes, based on learnings I've had from previous experiences scaling infrastructure. If you look at the markup PaaS (Heroku, Fly, Render) applies to IaaS (AWS, Hetzner), it's on the order of 5-10x. But not having that, and trying to stitch together random AWS services is a huge PITA for a medium sized engineering team (we've tried). On top of all that, theres a whole host of benefits to being on kubernetes, namely, that you can install any helm package with one click, which Canine also manages. A good example is Sentry -- even though it has an open source offering, almost everyone pays for the cloud version because its too scary to self host. With Canine, its a one click, and you get a sentry.your-domain.com to use for what

I'm working on a Heroku / Render / Flyio alternative thats free, open source, built on top of Kubernetes for about 2 years now. I’ve found these services charge way too much per GB of memory (10x more than IaaS providers), but more importantly, offer terrible flexibility. You can’t schedule multiple apps on the same instance, and there aren’t many instance size options. Canine also supports deployments of any helm package (postgres, airbyte, dagster, etc) via helm charts. https://github.com/czhu12/canine https://canine.sh

I'm working on a Heroku / Render / Flyio alternative thats free, open source, built on top of Kubernetes. Supports deployments of your own apps as well as 15k+ other packages (postgres, airbyte, dagster, etc) via helm charts. https://github.com/czhu12/canine https://canine.sh Reason? Got sick of paying for the massive markups on PaaS but missed the simplicity and convenience.

> they did not gain any traction. Energy on this project: https://github.com/czhu12/canine/graphs/code-frequency

Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL certificate management - Team management - Github integration But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than expected, but after a year, I’ve made some good progress The best

Same thing happened to us. Moved to kubernetes 2 years and we had to rebuild all the features of Heroku in house against a kubernetes backend. I’ve been working in my spare time to try to create an open source version of this, in case it would be useful to anyone else in the future https://github.com/czhu12/canine

I think one thing that is under appreciated with kubernetes is how massive the package library is. It becomes trivial to stand up basically every open source project with a single command via helm. It gets a lot of hate but for medium sized deployments, it’s fantastic. Before helm, just trying to run third party containers on bare metal resulted in constant downtime when the process would just hang for no reason, and and engineer would have to SSH and manually restart the instance. We used this as a previous start up to host metabase, sentry and airbyte seamlessly, on our own cluster. Which let us break out of the constant price increases we faced for hosted versions of these products. Shameless plug: I’ve been building https://github.com/czhu12/canine to try to make Kubernetes easier to use for solo developers. Would love any feedback fr

This is basically exactly what we needed at the start up I worked at, with the added need of being able to host open source projects (airbyte, metabase) with a reasonable level of confidence. We ended up migrating from Heroku to Kubernetes. I tried to take some of the learnings to build https://github.com/czhu12/canine It basically wraps Kubernetes and tries to hide as much complexity from Kubernetes as possible, and only expose the good parts that will be enough for 95% of web application work loads.