[HN Gopher] Show HN: Canine - A Heroku alternative built on Kube...
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Show HN: Canine - A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes
Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It
started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like
Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At
one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the
cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB
machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65
Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you
need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn't
a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management /
SSL certificate management - Team management - Github integration
But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like
Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than
expected, but after a year, I've made some good progress The best
part of Canine, is that it also makes it trivial to host any helm
chart, which is available for basically any open source project, so
everything from databases (e.g. Postgres, Redis), to random stuff
like torrent tracking servers, VPN's endpoints, etc. Open source:
https://github.com/czhu12/canine Cloud hosted version is:
https://canine.sh
Author : czhu12
Score : 121 points
Date : 2025-06-16 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| czhu12 wrote:
| Would also add -- this has been by far the funnest project I've
| ever built. Owning the "tech stack" from top to bottom is a super
| satisfying feeling.
|
| Rails app Canine infra Raspberry pi server My own ISP
|
| Was a tech stack I managed to get an app running on, for some
| projects I've kicked around.
| debarshri wrote:
| We maintain list of PaaS platform out there in the wild -
| https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas
| czhu12 wrote:
| Ah yeah I've been looking for these to submit to. Thanks, I'll
| submit a PR!
| mkesper wrote:
| The README is confusing me, could you mention how Kubernetes is
| created from your docker compose setup?
| czhu12 wrote:
| Yeah, documentaiton is one area I've been meaning to spend more
| time in. The application runs outside of Kubernetes, it
| effectively manages a Kubernetes cluster and exposes a "heroku"
| like interface.
|
| This way, it doesn't result in having to host a separate app
| within your cluster, saving resources. I was kind of imagining
| this to be deploying to fairly small, indie hacker type setups,
| so making sure that it was resource efficient was relatively
| important.
|
| The docker compose set up is just for local development. I'll
| make that more clear, thanks for the feedback!
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'm curious as to how storage and secrets are handled, since my
| recurring issue with Kubernetes is not deploying the containers
| or monitoring them but having a sane way to ensure a (re)deployed
| app or stack would use the same storage and/or multiple apps
| would put their data in consistent locations.
|
| Also, having seen the demo video, it's a happy path thing (public
| repo, has dockerfiles, etc. what about private code and images?)
| conqrr wrote:
| Very cool. I've looked into doing something similar for self
| hosting and have wanted something in between docker and
| Kubernetes. Nomad seemed like a good fit, but still a tad more
| work that dead simple docker and lack of ecosystem. I finally
| gave in to just using docker and living with deployment downtime
| on upgrades which is fine for a personal home server. But for
| production services, I wonder how much of K8s does Canine really
| abstract? Do I ever need to peek underneath the hood? I'm no k8s
| expert, but I wonder if there is simply no happy medium between
| these two.
| psviderski wrote:
| I'm actually building something in between Docker and
| Kubernetes: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud. Like you I
| wanted that middle ground without the operational overhead.
| It's basically Docker-like CLI and Docker Compose with multi-
| machine and production capabilities but no control plane to
| maintain.
|
| Still in active development but the goal is to keep it simple
| enough that you can easily understand what's happening at each
| layer and can troubleshoot.
| conqrr wrote:
| Looks promising and exactly what I want solved. Adding
| wireguard and Caddy is slick. How are you planning to go
| about Zero Downtime deploy? Maybe emulate Swarm?
| psviderski wrote:
| Thanks! For zero-downtime deploys, it does simple rolling
| updates one container at a time in a similar way k8s or
| swarm does it. It starts the new container alongside the
| old one, waits for it to become healthy, Caddy picks it up
| and updates its config, then removes the old one. The
| difference is that this process is driven by your CLI
| command (not a reconciliation loop in the cluster) so you
| get an instant feedback if something goes wrong.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I dig the concept! K8s is an amazing technology hampered by
| overwhelming complexity (flashback vibes to the early days of x86
| virtualization), and thumbing through your literature it seems
| you've got a good grasp of the fundamentals everyone needs in
| order to leverage K8s in more scenarios - especially areas where
| PVE, Microcloud, or Cockpit might end up being more popular
| within (namely self-hosting).
|
| I've got a spare N100 NUC at home that's languishing with an
| unfinished Microcloud install; thinking of yanking that off and
| giving Canine a try instead!
| cyberpunk wrote:
| i really don't know where this complexity thing comes from
| anymore. maybe back in the day where a k8s cluster was a 2 hour
| kubespray run or something but it's now a single yaml file and
| a ssh key if you use something like rke.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| i assume when people are talking about k8s complexity, it's
| either more complicated scenarios, or they're not talking
| about managed k8s.
|
| even then though, it's more that complex needs are complex
| and not so much that k8s is the thing driving the complexity.
|
| if your primary complexity is k8s you either are doing it
| wrong or chose the wrong tool.
| stego-tech wrote:
| > or they're not talking about managed k8s
|
| Bingo! Managed K8s on a hyperscaler is easy mode, and a
| godsend. I'm speaking from the cluster admin and bare metal
| perspectives, where it's a frustrating exercise in
| micromanaging all these additional abstraction layers just
| to get the basic "managed" K8s functions in a reliable
| state.
|
| If you're using managed K8s, then don't @ me about "It'S
| nOt CoMpLeX" because we're not even in the same book, let
| alone the same chapter. Hypervisors can deploy to bare
| metal and shared storage without much in the way of
| additional configuration, but K8s requires defining PVs,
| storage classes, network layers, local DNS, local firewalls
| and routers, etc, most of which it does _not_ want to play
| nicely with pre-1.20 out of the box. It's gotten better
| these past two years for sure, but it's still not as plug-
| and-play as something like ESXi+vSphere /RHEL+Cockpit/PVE,
| and that's a damn shame.
|
| Hence why I'm always eager to drive something like Canine!
|
| (EDIT: and unless you absolutely have a reason to do bare
| metal self-hosted K8s from binaries you should absolutely
| be on a managed K8s cluster provider of some sort.
| Seriously, the headaches aren't worth the cost savings for
| any org of size)
| esseph wrote:
| I agree with all of this except for your bottom edit.
|
| Nutanix and others are helping a lot in this area. Also
| really like Talos and hope they keep growing.
| vanillax wrote:
| I was gonna echo this. K8s is rather easy to setup.
| Certificates, domains, CICD ( flux/argo ) is where some
| completely comes in.. If anyone wants to learn more I do have
| a video I think is the most straight forward yet
| productionalized capable setup for hosting at home.
| wesleychen wrote:
| Can you send me the video?
| KomoD wrote:
| I am interested in the video.
| xp84 wrote:
| A few years ago, I set up a $40 k8s "cluster" which consisted
| of a couple of nodes, at DigitalOcean, and I set it up using
| this tutorial:
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
| auto...
|
| I was able to create a new service and deploy it with a
| couple of simple, ~8-line ymls and the cluster takes care of
| setting up DNS on a subdomain of my main domain, wiring up
| Lets Encrypt, and deploying the container. Deploying the
| latest version of my built container image was one kubectl
| command. I loved it.
| esseph wrote:
| Running large deployments on bare metal and managing the
| software and firmware lifecycle still has significant
| complexity. Modern tooling makes things much better - but
| it's not "easy".
|
| The kubernetes iceberg is 3+ years old but still fairly
| accurate.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/u9b95u/kubernet.
| ..
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You are so used to the idiosyncrasies of k8s that you are
| probably blind to them. And you are probably so experienced
| with the k8s stack that you can easily debug issues so you
| discount them.
|
| Not long ago, I was using Google Kubernetes Engine when DNS
| started failing inside the k8s cluster on a routine deploy
| that didn't touch the k8s config.
|
| I hacked on it for quite some time before I gave up and
| decided to start a whole new cluster. At which point I
| decided to migrate to Linode if I was going to go through the
| trouble. It was pretty sobering.
|
| Kubernetes has many moving parts that move inside your part
| of the stack. That's one of the things that makes it complex
| compared to things like Heroku or Google Cloud Run where the
| moving parts run in the provider's side of the stack.
| czhu12 wrote:
| The part I found to be a little unwieldy at times was helm. It
| becomes a little unpredictable when you apply updates to the
| values.yaml file, which ones will apply, and which ones need to
| be set on start up. Also, some helm installations deploy a
| massive number of services, and it's confusing which ones are
| safe to restart when.
|
| But, I've always found core kubernetes to be a delight to work
| with, especially for stateless jobs.
| nwienert wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 100% agreed on both points.
| czhu12 wrote:
| 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!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| please keep it. it is awesome (and have to be said)! (but add
| the critical points too)
| serbuvlad wrote:
| On the webpage at the "Why you should NOT use Canine" section, it
| is possible to swipe away a card that is in the background, which
| is very weird UX.
|
| Chrome 137. Android 13.
|
| Other than that... I'll give it a shot. Have three N100 NUCs. Two
| are currently unused after failed attempts to learn to use k8s.
|
| Maybe this'll do the trick.
| Everhusk wrote:
| I've also always wondered why computing costs keep going down but
| cloud costs keep going up.
|
| You deserve an award for building this, thank you.
| Everhusk wrote:
| I've always wondered why cloud costs keep going up, while
| computing costs keep going down.
|
| You deserve an award for building this, thank you!
| czhu12 wrote:
| Yeah in our last year at my previous company, we spent over
| ~$400k on what amounted to about ~512GB of memory across our
| fleet of 8 instances on a PaaS vendor. We were almost always
| memory bound, so I don't even know the compute side.
|
| Given that the hardware itself now costs less than 8k to
| purchase outright, just seemed ridiculous. Albeit we did have
| SOC2, enterprise plan, etc, but it was a painful bill every
| quarter.
| utf_8x wrote:
| Any particular reason why this runs outside the cluster?
| dboreham wrote:
| Don't know anything about this project, but usually the reason
| is "because there could be N clusters", and sometimes "because
| I want the cluster to come and go frequently" (e.g. for testing
| workloads).
| czhu12 wrote:
| Main reason is that I wanted to be able to support single VPS
| K3s clusters all the way down to ~512MB.
|
| K3s already takes up about 100MB which only leaves 400 for the
| application, so trying to run Canine on that machine would
| probably create too much bloat.
| film42 wrote:
| Looks great! I'm definitely in the market for something like
| this; and building on top of helm charts makes me want to try it
| out.
|
| Can Canine automatically upgrade my helm charts? That would be
| killer. I usually stay on cloud-hosted paid plans because
| remembering to upgrade is not fun. The next reason is that I
| often need to recall the ops knowledge just after I've forgotten
| it.
| czhu12 wrote:
| It can apply upgrades but I don't think it solves your core
| problem, which is how to perform upgrades safely. Most of the
| time its totally fine, but sometimes a config key changes
| across versions.
|
| Upgrading helm charts without some manual monitoring seems like
| it might still be an unsolved problem :(
| eviluncle wrote:
| So nice to see modern open source being built with rails. it's
| the ultimate productivity framework
| vanillax wrote:
| Can you make it so I can use my existing k8 cluster? or does it
| have to always use your embedded k3s? It seems like if you are
| just using k3s it should be easy to bring your own...
| vanillax wrote:
| Nit pick. Kubernetes doesnt run docker containers. It run
| containers that conform to the Open Container Initiative ( OCI )
| . Docker is a licensed brand name.
| cmckn wrote:
| Another nit here:
| https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern...
|
| I know this is just a general description, but "10,000 servers"
| --> Kubernetes actually only claims support up to 5,000 nodes:
| https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...
|
| Plenty of larger clusters exist, but this usually requires
| extensive tuning (such as entirely replacing the API registry).
| And obviously the specific workload plays a large role.
| Kubernetes is actually quite far from supporting larger
| clusters out of the box, though most releases include some work
| in that direction.
| czhu12 wrote:
| Ah yeah I could be wrong. In my early days at Airbnb, I
| recall someone doing an internal test to prove it could scale
| to 10k servers, but this was back in 2016 and I wasn't the
| one doing the test.
|
| I'll walk that back
| TheTaytay wrote:
| 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?
| czhu12 wrote:
| 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...
| lloydjones wrote:
| I started using Coolify a few months ago -- Do you have a "pitch"
| as to how Canine is different or better?
|
| Good work either way!
| bitpush wrote:
| Isnt Coolify a Vercel alternative? In that, you dont see any
| k8s primitives (services, load balancer etc).
|
| In my head, I put coolify, vercel as higher in the stack.
| fly.io, heroku, canine to be closer to metal, and all the on
| the metal is k8s and friends.
| lloydjones wrote:
| That's an interesting way of looking at it.
|
| Though I do believe that Coolify will "eventually" support
| Kubernetes, I think what you're saying feels right to me.
| jambay wrote:
| The interaction design looks fairly intuitive. Good luck!
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Isn't Heroku build on Erlang/OTP because it essentially has
| Kubernetes-like functionality out-of-box.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| this is identical to https://www.kubero.dev/
|
| the problem is that kubero, Idk they did not gain any traction.
|
| maybe most user want simple tools like coolify
| yarone wrote:
| This is awesome, great work!
| indigodaddy wrote:
| The video example is a little confusing from a "I just want to
| self host the whole thing on a single machine/VM etc"
| perspective. If that's what I want to do, do I still have to
| create a cluster by putting in some managed DO K8s reference? Eg
| I just want it to use the local VM for the cluster. Do you have
| some other videos or can you make some that show say how to
| install it all-in-one on a single machine, and then from there
| how to add/deploy an app?
| czhu12 wrote:
| Yeah, so the setup I have there is basically: for staging / non
| prod apps, I typically just boot a single Hetzner VPS, and then
| install a K8 compliant server, then I'm off to the races.
|
| Production, I usually use digital ocean, so then I get a
| managed kubernetes, but also a managed postgres within the same
| data center for latency needs. Let's me sleep easier at night
| :)
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Gotcha, I just think a big part of your audience will want to
| one-box it for personal hobbyist apps and projects. Do you
| have documentation for your staging approach?
| znpy wrote:
| I used heroku manh years ago and i have fond memories of it.
|
| I think the landing page fails at answering the two most basic
| questions:
|
| 1. Can i deploy via a stupid simple "git push" ?
|
| 2. Can i express what my workloads are via a stupid simple
| Procfile?
| reassess_blind wrote:
| Is there an option to just drag drop project files, instead of
| using GitHub? That's how I prefer to test these out.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Brilliant if an entire industry becomes a commodity complement
| because some angry dev got fed up of paying $400. Love it!
| matus_congrady wrote:
| At https://stacktape.com, we're also in the same space. We're
| offering Heroku-like experience on top of your own AWS account.
|
| I like what you're doing. But, to behonst, it's a tough market.
| While the promise of $265 vs $4 might seem like a no-brainer,
| you're comparing apples to oranges.
|
| - Your DX is most likely be far from Heroku's. Their developer
| experience is refined by 100,000s developers. It's hard to think
| through everything, and you're very unlikely to make it anywhere
| close, once you go beyond simple use-cases.
|
| - A "single VM" setup is not really production-grade. You're
| lacking reliability, scalability, redundancy and many more
| features that these platforms have. It definitely works for low-
| traffic side-projects. But people or entities that actually have
| a budget for something like this, and are willing to pay, are
| usually looking for a different solution.
|
| That being said, I wish you all the luck. Maybe things change it
| the AI-generated apps era.
| federicotdn wrote:
| I can't get Project creation to work. I click on "Deploy from
| Docker Hub instead -", fill in the details (name, image,
| cluster), and when I click Submit, I'm taken to the Projects page
| again (empty).
|
| edit: looks like POST https://canine.sh/projects is returning
| 422.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Is this simple to deploy to and use like Heroku, or do I need to
| use docking and kubertenes? I would love a cheaper Heroku!
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