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First of all, I'm often looking for a better "Heroku-esque" experience on my own metal, so thank you! This looks neat!
Also, your docs on how K8s works look really good, and might be the most approachable docs I've seen on the subject. https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern...
Question: I assumed when I read the pitch, that I could spin up a managed K8s somewhere, like in Digital Ocean, and use this somehow. But after reading docs and comments, it sounds like this needs to manage my K8s for me? I guess my question is: 1) When I spin up a "Cluster" on Hetzner, is that just dividing up a single machine, or is it a true K8s cluster that spans across multiple machines? 2) If I run this install script on another server, does it join the cluster, giving me true distributed servers to host the pods? 3) Is there a way to take an existing managed K8s and have Canine deploy to it?
Yeah so at the moment it kind of supports two options: 1. A single Hetzner VPS 2. An existing Kubernetes cluster.
I usually use #1 for staging / development apps, and then #2 for production apps. For #2, I manage the number of nodes on the Digital Ocean side, and kubernetes just magically reschedules my workload accordingly (also can turn on auto scaling).
I think the thing that you're getting at that is not supported is having Canine create a multi-node cluster directly within Hetzner.
There is a terraform to create a Kubernetes cluster from hetzner, but this isn't currently installed on Canine.
I'm not closed to trying it out, there were a few UI improvements I wanted to take a shot at first, but at the moment Canine assume's you have a cluster ready to go, or can help you walk through a K3s installation to a single VPS.
https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...
By TheTaytay 2025-06-170:49 Oh! This is good news! I was not asking about K8s on Hetzner per se. I was asking if I could spin up a managed cluster (on Digital Ocean, etc) and use this on it. It sounds like I can, which is great! I think I missed that in the docs.
First - I really want something like this to exists and be great, so best of luck. As of today I'd consider this or Dokploy (Docker Swarm is underrated).
Small feedback - your "Why you should NOT use Canine" section actually is a net-negative for me. I actually was thinking it was cool that it may actually list downsides, but then you did a sarcastic thing that was annoying. I think you should just be frank - you'll have to purchase and manage servers, you'll be on the hook if they go down and have to get them back up, this is an early product made by one person, etc.
Haha, well there goes my attempt to be different from the other landing pages out there. I'll take another stab, but appreciate the feedback!
By harrisreynolds 2025-06-1714:401 reply Yeah... I like this "Why you should not use Canine" section too.
I was just on Posthog's site this morning and saw a similar section...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rky248hgutwzzkzwhifxz/posthog...
I'm all for doing it, the problem as-is is there are real downsides to something like Canine especially when it's super early like this. Posthog gets away with it because they aren't alpha (and have better humor, amongst other things).
I say keep it, just add some honesty there too.
By harrisreynolds 2025-06-1718:50 Yeah... the Posthog stuff is really funny! :-)
By 1oooqooq 2025-06-1622:18 please keep it. it is awesome (and have to be said)! (but add the critical points too)
What’s the state of docker swarm? I stopped following years ago when it felt the software has been abandoned by the docker team
It is supported by docker and not abandoned. I just checked latest docker engine release notes and there are multiple fixes and enhancements. Certainly not as popular, compared to Kubernetes, but it is there.
By horsawlarway 2025-06-1714:242 reply Eh, it's not quite that simple.
What the person above you is thinking of is almost certainly "swarm classic" which is actually dead (see: https://github.com/docker-archive/classicswarm)
Docker does support a different "Swarm mode" style deployment configuration, which is functionally https://github.com/moby/swarmkit, and really feels much more like Kubernetes to me than the original docker swarm.
I'm... honestly not sure why you'd pick it as a solution over all the k8s tooling they've been doing instead. It feels like the same level of complexity and then only benefit is that it's easier to configure than bare metal k8s, but things like k3s and microk8s tackle that same space.
If anyone is really using the swarm mode for a production service, I'd love to hear different opinions, though!
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-06-1714:462 reply If I were going to build out bare-metal k8s, I would first try Swarm instead. I would not use k3s or an alternative. The biggest problem with k8s (any version of it) is its overall cost in expertise and maintenance is incredibly high (if you're doing it right; many people are completely ignorant to how terribly they're maintaining it and assume their cost is low). Swarm's cost is going to be significantly smaller, both in the short and long term.
By horsawlarway 2025-06-1716:39 Can you speak more precisely about what costs you think something like k3s imposes that are solved by swarm?
Right now this comment has the same kind of FUD that I see in the swarm docs (there is no "why" to swarm in the docker published docs that feels particularly compelling, especially given the amount of time and energy docker seems to be putting into their k8s tooling instead).
I'm willing to bite - but I run a baremetal cluster on k3s, and it's very simple to keep up to date.
By conradfr 2025-06-1718:50 That's what CapRover uses.
By chrisweekly 2025-06-1621:15 100% agreed on both points.
We maintain list of PaaS platform out there in the wild - https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas
dokku is a minimal PaaS that can also run on a VPS. There's a dokku-scheduler-kubernetes: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes
But it doesn't have support Helm charts.
Cloud computing architecture > Delivery links to SaaS, DaaS, DaaS, PaaS, IaaS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_architecture
Cloud-computing comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison
Category:Cloud_platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms
awesome-selfhosted has a serverless / FaaS category that just links to awesome-sysadmin > PaaS: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sof...
By kot-behemoth 2025-06-177:08 I’ve recently started an open-source self-hosted data platform (https://github.com/kot-behemoth/kitsunadata) with Dokku being a great initial deployment mode. It’s mature, simple to get started and has tons of docs / tutorials.
I collected a bunch of links while learning it, and launched https://github.com/kot-behemoth/awesome-dokku, as there wasn’t an “awesome” list.
Hope it helps someone!
By emilsedgh 2025-06-175:02 https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/
This is a more featureful version.
By czhu12 2025-06-1619:19 Ah yeah I've been looking for these to submit to. Thanks, I'll submit a PR!
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