[benbristow]

I love the fact Heroku have open-sourced their buildpacks. Dokku takes great use of these and provides a very similar platform to themselves that you can host yourself (DigitalOcean even provide a base-image that will pre-configure Dokku for you). Great for personal websites and the like.

If you want to scale in a pinch then it's a case of making some tiny tweaks and pushing to Heroku instead.

[justinsaccount]

I run some things at home using dokku and I switched them all to use Dockerfiles since the buildpacks are crazy slow.

Not 100% sure if that is the fault of the dokku implementation or buildpacks in general though. It's all IO related, so I might not even have noticed it had I had faster disks.

[jacques_chester]

Cloud Native Buildpacks are substantially faster in a number of scenarios. Some of the preliminary Java buildpack changes on the Cloud Foundry side have updates dropping from minutes to milliseconds.

[benbristow]

They do seem quite slow. I don't think it's so much I/O related as I'm using a DigitalOcean VPS which has an SSD.

I'm not too fussed as I only deploy once in a blue moon if I need to quickly update my website or something. I can see it getting frustrating if you've got a larger product/app doing CI and deploys every merge to master.

[yebyen]

Deis Workflow (now Hephy) used them too! We still use them, and it's a great resource for projects in the same vein.

Although there are some issues with buildpacks in production, they are a great set of training wheels. I'm excited about what's happening with the next generation of buildpacks, CNB is a standard with the support of more than just Heroku – Pivotal is "the other buildpacks company," also involved, and I'm not sure how many other companies!

It's clear sometimes that when you work with containers at scale, that what you're building a lot of layer cakes, and you need to treat the layers separately to remain effective at scale. Some of the ideas like swapping layers out are pretty far out and cool.