Dokku vs. Google App Engine

If you have your own in-house servers or have a cloud server with the freedom to configure any PaaS that you want, then Dokku is for you. So far, I have never run into a scenario where Dokku was not able to fit my needs, after deploying many different types of applications with varying frameworks, languages, and connected services. If you already have a PaaS available, however, Dokku may not be for you.

Incentivized

Google App Engine is especially well suited for situations where there is a variable workload during the day, e.g. inbound task processing with task queues. In this situation queues can be setup with parameters governing the process speed/scaling which allows you to easily balance performance with cost and meet a good balance.

Incentivized

• Dockerfile deployments are an incredibly simple and straightforward way to spin up applications.
• The docker-options plugin allows endless direct configuration of options passed to different docker lifecycle stages.

Incentivized

• Building an application that uses Google's Authentication, means users no longer need to remember an different user id and password. Once they are logged into to Google, they can seamlessly access your application hosted on Google App Engine.
• Google App Engine automatically scales up and down. SO if your application receives a spike in user traffic, App Engine automatically launches additional instances of your application to cater for the increased traffic. Once App Engine detects that the spike is usage is over, it automatically scales down to handle the current traffic.
• Google App Engine can be easily integrated with Google Cloud SQL, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage etc, so that you can build out a full application using one or more of Google's Cloud Platform products.

Incentivized

• Dokku might overreach on its assumptions about how you want to host your app, using its own VHOSTS plugin by default. This may be a pro or a con depending on what you want.
• Proxy port configuration can be somewhat difficult, with Dokku resetting any pre-deployment configuration to "smart" defaults on the first deployment.

Incentivized

• For beginners, there is a learning curve that can be reduced by decluttering the functionalities.
• For much big migrations it takes to a lot of time to deploy which can be reduced.
• The scaling of applications based on the user count is not seamless and it requires improvement.

Incentivized

App Engine is a solid choice for deployments to Google Cloud Platform that do not want to move entirely to a Kubernetes-based container architecture using a different Google product. For rapid prototyping of new applications and fairly straightforward web application deployments, we'll continue to leverage the capabilities that App Engine affords us.

Incentivized

Google App Engine is very intuitive. It has the common programming language most would use. Google is a dependable name and I have not had issues with their servers being down....ever. You can safely use their service and store your data on their servers without worrying about downtime or loss of data.

Incentivized

Dokku is incredibly well documented and also takes advantage of the documentation and community of Heroku, being essentially the same thing, but in the case that you encounter an actual bug or issue, it can take time for a fix to make it into a new version. Since you manage Dokku yourself, there is no support team to call for help.

Incentivized

Good amount of documentation available for Google App Engine and in general there is large developer community around Google App Engine and other products it interacts with. Lastly, Google support is great in general. No issues so far with them.

Incentivized

Dokku is essentially the same thing as Heroku, except maintained by you on the platform of your choice. If you have any experience using Heroku, then you will feel right at home using Dokku. Dokku is an entirely free to use PaaS, requiring only that you have a platform to deploy it on, making it far more versatile than Heroku in my opinion.

Incentivized

App Engine is a much more streamlined system than EC2. There is a fundamental difference between them, but they are used for basically the same thing as far a I could tell -- to serve applications EC2 is certainly more complicated, but if offers more machine-level control if that's what you need. It can tend to cost more as well. App Engine is far more straightforward but there are limitations if you need to change the environment. But even then, Google Compute Engine also compares to EC2 and stays within GCP.

Incentivized

• Since there's no investment besides a little time to set up, the return has been overwhelmingly positive.
• Deploying a new app is incredibly quick and easy.

Incentivized

• App Engine can scale basically infinitely so our users can always expect fast responsiveness.
• App Engine has saved us money by only using the resources we need when we need them.
• The security and IAM policies surrounding App Engine have saved a lot of head aches.

Incentivized