[maccman]

It's absolutely true that Heroku is a lot more than what Dokku, Docker & Vagrant provide, especially when it comes to auto-scaling. Heroku is a good choice for many - but it's also good to have alternatives. For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances.

To your points though:

* Dokku uses Heroku's buildpacks and auto-detects your stack when you git push

* Dokku-alt supports collaboration & user-permissions

* Logging is automatically handled (dokku logs app-name)

* Support for Memcache/Redis is baked in (dokku redis:create app-name)

* Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS.

[merlincorey]

> For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances.

> * Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS.

That's funny - I've costed it, and it's cheaper to run equal sized instances of a DB node than to run RDS, plus you get way more control over the tuning and implementation of your database layer.