Funny to see Deis is not mentioned here. It runs on top of Kubernetes and seems to deliver quite a similar experience to Hyper. Compared to Hyper, Deis seems a bit more towards the Heroku style of doing things, which is not a bad thing at all. And the Deis team came up with Helm which is an amazing way to deploy whole sets of containers as if your are installing packages with a package manager.
I haven't used Deis but I have used Dokku and Flynn.
I found both easy to get started with. Flynn works well with DO and AWS although I couldn't get it to work with any third-party hosts (ssh auth issues).
Took me about an hour to setup 3 load balanced nodes and deploy their test go app which writes to Postgres.
There are issues with Flynn though:
- Missing Dokku's rich plugin support (Let's Encrypt is a breeze on Dokku)
- Log shipping
- Docs need work. I had to dive into the issues to figure out how to setup the custom domain names
- The HA is a bit murky. I downed two of my three nodes and the cluster collapsed. Since Flynn runs on one machine I expected it to work
I personally think there is a big gap in the market for a company that can provides a thin layer on top of the various IaaS providers to create the ease of Heroku with lower costs.
> The HA is a bit murky. I downed two of my three nodes and the cluster collapsed. Since Flynn runs on one machine I expected it to work
I'd expect this is by design. In a 3-node system that takes CP out of the CAP theorem (consistency over availability), you can only lose one node before the system becomes unavailable. This is because, as far as the remaining node knows, the other two nodes could still be up but network partitioned off from it. To prevent a split brain in such a scenario, you need a majority of nodes to be accessible or else they'll intentionally stop working.
tl;dr: A 3-node cluster with 2 nodes down is not the same thing as a 1-node cluster.
If you want a (in my opinion) really good alternative to flynn, I 100% reccomend Deis. Since v2 it's built ontop of Kubernetes so it has a strong infrastructure base.
