Here's a better question. For people that roll their eyes at the mere mention of "serverless" (like me), what is the value proposition of Dokku over VMs and your own dockers?
Don't convince me it is like AWS serverless. Convince me to give up VMs and docker images.
One benefit for me was that a vps with 2vcors and 2-4gig of ram is about the same price as one of these app engine services. So I can run 3 or 4 dokku apps including Postgres, redis, memcache connected to them on my own vps and still have margin when inspiration strikes. I moved a production app from heroku to dokku and saved hundreds a month and still got tons and tons more compute.
Well its problem is that you still have to... install the entire thing. Whatever serverless means, it should allow programmers to focus on their code, not on the platform. Like, at all.
It’s the backend that implements serverless architecture. A serverless server, I guess. Roll your eyes if you like, but “serverless” is still a snappier term than “declarative on-demand server provisioning, configuration, and scaling” and most people are into that whole brevity thing.
Except Dokku doesn't do those things. Dokku doesn't scale your app automatically and it doesn't shut it off when it's not being used. It runs your web server process continuously, handles some 12 factor config, and does some nginx stuff for you. Until this year it didn't support managing a cluster at all and was entirely focused on single box deploys. The scale command just runs more processes on the same machine which if you're not using Node is probably not even a good idea to do.
