Cloud

Running Dokku Locally

Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS (Platform as a Service) that gives you a Heroku-like deployment experience on your own Linux box. A single wget command installs all the necessary tooling. From there, you configure SSH key access, set a git remote on your project, and git push to deploy — Dokku handles the build process, waits for a health check, and performs a zero-downtime swap of the running instance.

It operates on a single host, so scaling is vertical rather than horizontal. In practice this takes you further than you might expect — a modest VPS is capable of running multiple applications simultaneously, and cloud providers can scale resources substantially before Kubernetes becomes a meaningful consideration. If you do need to move beyond a single host, the Dockerfile-based build process keeps your containers portable to GCP, AWS, or wherever you land.

Cloudinary DAM

I was lucky enough recently to implement Cloudinary as a DAM solution on a project. A DAM being short for a digital asset manager. This is a type of cloud service typically used in the media and entertainment sectors. They’ve been around for decades but SaaS solutions have opened up, offering these services to the wider website consumer market. This enables sites running on Wordpress or Mageneto (or any CMS) to pick up an off the shelf solution. There are real SEO and User Engagement benefits to integrating one into your asset pipeline. Lets dig in to what Cloudinary has to offer and why this can help a website.