sup

One way to overcome that might be to use ansible to automate: 1. Dokku setup on a new server 2. Deploy your app from a git repository 3. Restore your database from backup If you aren't comfortable with ansible you can use Fabric [0] or Sup [1]. I think there's even an ansible guide for Dokku deployment on their blog [2]. [0] https://www.fabfile.org/ [1] https://github.com/pressly/sup [2] https://dokku.github.io/general/automating-dokku-setup

Nothing. Occasionally I upgrade the specs on one of the machines (vertical scaling) with one click. I'm not so bothered about having a bit of extra capacity since the VMs are so much cheaper than on GCS/AWS/Azure. Eventually I might want to add more machines to the cluster. That would take me a few minutes. I use sup scripts to do the setup. I like it much better than Ansible. https://github.com/pressly/sup

Looks a lot like sup[1]. [1]: https://github.com/pressly/sup

Probably not. Container services really shine when you have a lot of different teams that all need to launch services and not worry about what happens at the hardware level or where they run. This makes sense at a lot of large companies like Facebook and Google where they have a dedicated team running the container layer. GKE makes it a bit easier but then you're locked into Google Cloud. If you're only running a few services it really doesn't make much sense to setup Kubernetes. I setup a small cluster a few weeks ago and it certainly was a lot more involved than I expected. I ended up deciding not to use it, since it didn't really add much (for my use case) and I felt like if anything went wrong I'd be in a world of hurt trying to debug it. Took a lot more time to setup Kubernetes than my entire current deployment system which uses http

Sup also works well https://github.com/pressly/sup