Show HN: Coolify v2 – Open-source and self-hostable Heroku/Netlify alternative
I love these projects and I&#x27;ll definitely look into it more later. At the same time, I think it would be hard for me to want to leave Kubernetes. K8s isn&#x27;t something that I love, but it&#x27;s something that I know works and will continue to be supported in some fashion. I&#x27;ve seen Flynn (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;flynn&#x2F;flynn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;flynn&#x2F;flynn</a>) EOL. I&#x27;ve seen Docker Swarm&#x27;s future be a bit hazy. I&#x27;ve seen Porter decide to put pretty restrictive limits on their free tier (though it is open source). I&#x27;ve seen Dokku lose steam and then pick up again - but still not be a solution for more than one server.<p>I love the idea of something that will Just Work, but a lot of stuff doesn&#x27;t handle the parts I care about the most. Will my one-click PostgreSQL have a couple replicas in my cluster? Will it launch pg-backrest so I can have it backed up to S3? Will it deal with secret storage so I can just add my secrets in the UI and then have my apps grab those secrets as environment vars? Will it fail-over nicely?<p>Coolify looks really cool and I do want to check it out for real later (probably over the weekend to be realistic). However, it seems like it&#x27;s single-server (for now) and that seems less compelling for me at the moment. It looks like you&#x27;re planning on K8s support which would just be wonderful.<p>Part of me wishes I could get a much simplified UI for K8s. I use Lens at the moment and while it&#x27;s very good, it doesn&#x27;t really smooth over the rough bits of K8s, just kinda organizes and presents them. K8s isn&#x27;t as bad as a lot of people say once you get past the pain of learning. Still, it misses the mark if what you just want a few simple things Heroku-style instead of every bell and whistle. Small users don&#x27;t care about ingress, they just want their app to be accessible. Small users aren&#x27;t interested in namespaces or storage classes or roles. Sure, it&#x27;s important for K8s to support storage classes for large users who might have all sorts of opinions on how they want their data stored. For a small user, you often just want it stored on the local disk.<p>Likewise, I think there&#x27;s a reasonably small set of things people often want to run. For example, the databases Coolify supports (MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, RedisDB) are probably what 95% of people want. There are K8s operators to run them, but like K8s itself it can often be &quot;here&#x27;s every knob we could think of, we documented 80% of them, now go write some yaml.&quot; Heroku lets me deploy PostgreSQL without that. Why can&#x27;t I get something a bit more slimmed down like Heroku on K8s - so that if I need the additional power in the future, I can get my hands on it.<p>I&#x27;d even love it if this hypothetical K8s Heroku could commit the yaml it is going to apply to a GitHub repository for me so I can easily track infrastructure changes. It would even let people become more comfortable with K8s as they saw the changes they were making in the UI show up as commits in a repository.<p>I think the point of this rambling is that Coolify is kinda what people want from one perspective - something that seems nice and friendly and handle the cases that the vast majority of people need solved. However, it lacks the critical mass of K8s which can always leave its future in doubt (it looks like there are two of you on this project and open source can take a toll on people) and without high-availability&#x2F;multi-server it feels a bit lacking for what so many people are looking for in a self-hosted Heroku. Coolify feels like what I&#x27;m looking for - I just want it with high-availability and the possibility of continuing on even if the project shuts down (because I can just use an underlying K8s layer, not because it&#x27;s open source and I could become the new maintainer).<p>It feels like there&#x27;s two camps that don&#x27;t talk to each other: awesome UX people who know what people want and people building solutions that companies want while scaling up (but end up with a bit of a UX mess).