It‘s a tradeoff: a real PaaS is more managed, fault tolerant, and scalable, Dokku is much less expensive, especially with multiple projects.
One server scales vertically and can serve a good number of projects and users. Huge spikes eg. due to attacks, lead to outages instead of runaway bills.
To get started in a simpler way, and in a way that solves 80% of use cases.
Once you need to scale, then you can scale. Why worry about that upfront with all the complexity it entails?
>what if your one server runs out of resources to fit more apps on
We've supported multiple servers for a few years and have had official k3s support since the beginning of the year, so not just one server anymore. We even support managing the servers associated in a k3s-based cluster.
Ohhh, I stand corrected. I don't think that was an option the last time I looked at Dokku. I see the schedulers section in the docs now, thanks for pointing it out!
Does the k3s scheduler work with existing non-k3s k8s clusters as well?
You can still solve for that just fine in a multi-Dokku setup. It's just that Dokku won't do the coordination for you. Sometimes you do want something more integrated like k8s/openshift/nomad instead; sometimes not.
Dokku's multi-server offering is based on k3s. We interact with k3s but offload any actual clustering to k3s itself as it does the job better than Dokku could :) You can also just tie Dokku into an existing K8s cluster on your favorite cloud provider instead.
Lol