Comment by dewey 7 hours ago
I'd also suggest people to take a look at Dokku, it's a very mature project with a similar scope and was discussed here a few weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41358020
I wrote up my own experiences too (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/selfhosting-with-dokku-and...) and I can only recommend it. It is ~3 commands to set up an app, and one push to deploy after that.
My VPS provider just lets me take image snapshots of the whole machine so I can roll back to a point in time. It's a little slower and less flexible than application or component level but overall I don't even think about backup and restore now because I know it's handled there.
Providing robust restoring and backup systems for a system that allows to run any kind of workload is almost impossible. You'd have to provide database backups for all versions of all databases, correct file backup for the volumes etc.
It feels much more dangerous to have such a system instead in place and provide false sense of security. Users know best what kind of data they need to backup, where they want to back it up, if it needs to be encrypted or not, if it needs to be daily or weekly etc.
Postgres is recovering from a crash if it's reading from a ZFS snapshot. It probably did have several of it's database writes succeed that it wasn't certain of, and others fail that it also wasn't certain of, and those might not have been "in order". That's why WAL files exist, and it needs to fully replay them.
Been using dokku for probably 8 years now? (or something close to that; it used to be written entirely in bash!) Hosting private stuff on it, and an application at $oldplace probably also still runs on this solid setup. Highly recommended, and the devs are a great sport!
I've kept a list of these tools that I've been meaning to check out. In scope, do they cover securing the instance? Is there any automation for creating networks of instances?
> In scope, do they cover securing the instance?
Most of these I checked don't, but a recent Ubuntu version is perfectly fine to use as-is.
> Is there any automation for creating networks of instances?
Not that I'm aware, it would also defeat the purpose of these tools a bit that are supposed to be simple. (Dokku is "just" a shell script).
Depends on what you prefer. I went with Dokku as for me it was important that I could run docker-compose based apps along side with my "Dokku managed" apps. I didn't want to convert my existing apps (Sonarr, Radarr etc.) into Dokku apps and only use Dokku for my web projects.
I also wanted to be able to remove Dokku if needed and everything would continue to run as before. Both of these work very well with Dokku.
Part of me dies every time I see projects not integrating robust restoring and backup systems.