I wrote a Heroku-like mini-PaaS (https://github.com/piku) to escape containers for a bit, but it now acts as a stepping-stone: I iterate quickly on it, then add a Dockerfile :)
It is a way to get the same sort of developer experience benefit as dokku, but without dockers and containers, using plain UNIXy tools on a single Linux node. The above link explains how it works.
If you want to omit the registry stage, with KwaWingu.com you can deploy a GitHub repo directly to a container, with full control over the Dockerfile. The container lives behind an SSL-terminated ALB to which you can associate a domain name if you're running a public web service. Auto-scaling not yet supported but coming in the future.
This is essentially a web app that helps you deploy new instances of my Datasette application https://github.com/simonw/datasette without having to install anything on your own machine first.
I'm using new features of the Zeit API - https://zeit.co/api - which makes it trivial to build apps that themselves deploy other apps. You dynamically construct a Dockerfile plus associated files, POST it to their deployment API and get back a URL which will host the resulting container: https://zeit.co/api#endpoints/deployments
The possibilities with this kind of API are pretty amazing. Here's their announcement: https://zeit.co/blog/api-2
You can also do that with rootless containers via Podman. There’s even a convenient wrapper for that workflow made by Red Hat called Toolbox (https://github.com/containers/toolbox)
I'm in the process of building a system to do just that; super easy, small to medium container deployment. It's still a WIP and there's not much (or any) documentation, but if it generates some interest I'll work on it more and maybe post a Show HN.
In short, all you have to do is POST a url to a github repo and the system will pull your code, build a docker image from your Dockerfile, spin up a container, and then reverse proxy to the container's IP.
All you have to do is provide a repo with a Dockerfile and the deployment system does the rest.
I used to easily add a sidecar container to my k8s workload, with the tools I need, without having to maintain a dockerfile and setup an automation to build the container.
Dokku is something I normally use. Running on the smallest Digital Ocean instance.
Another Docker-based solution I currently look at is https://deployit.io - because it wants to offer a very user friendly seamless integration of local, remote self-hosting and remote their-hosting. Open Source, on github.
DigitalOcean for example has one click Dokku installs. They also have the more morern managed containers thing that many PaaS are offering, where you can git push your app and it'll run in a container.
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