Repobus (https://www.repobus.com/) yet to be launched will provide this functionality in DO or any other cloud. Simply add your nodes and that is it. It is a Heroku like platform on your VPS. Launching sometime in April.

I might be wrong, but isn't Convox only operational in the AWS cloud. If I want to run Convox on Azure, GCP or bluemix, will this be possible?

The empire alternative pointed out also appears to be another option only operational in the AWS cloud.

Correct, both the Convox ECS rack and Empire are AWS exclusive. Convox has a public-beta of their rack running on Kubernetes which is cloud agnostic as it only needs a Kubernetes cluster to operate in.

Does Convox provision and manage the underlying Kubernetes cluster or depends on the Cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering?

Convox does not manage the underlying Kubernetes cluster. If you're using EKS it's managed by AWS, GKE by GCP, AKS by Azure, etc. If you're using a self-hosted cluster, then it's up to you to manage it. The Convox platform runs as Kubernetes CRDS so it is cloud agnostic.

Perhaps to answer the question, one might ask: How is Heroku different from Dokku?

Having used both extensively, the answer is as simple as one is private/hosted and the other is open/self-hosting.

Heroku is easy, but expensive. Dokku is more work/management, but cost-effective.

For one, Heroku has dedicated customer support when you pay them.

That difference is very clear: you still need to buy and manage your own (cloud) server to run dokku on.

Agree, I am actually aware of both services. Personally, I am not sold on functions yet mainly due to the high startup time. I cannot see myself building a project that leverages a functions framework specific to cloud provider X. I however could be wrong on functions and its adoption in the general Dev community.

Alright, but why would I pay for your service over a VPS with one of those tools or Heroku? What part of the process do you take over or automate?

The plan is to automate from server provisioning to deployment but of course I cannot build integrations with all the cloud providers out there. In that case, you could buy the server, provide the IP address and credentials to log in and then the service does everything. Once the server is provisioned or added, you create an application from the dashboard and then git push to it. Will come with monitoring tools and alerts if you choose to set any. For those who can work Dokku and Flynn by themselves perhaps, it could be enough. But as compared to Heroku, you could save lots of money when you not paying for each app. Of course I need to mention the service itself could even be free and find other ways to make money.

Right, makes sense, wanted to point out the service will also be usable on GCP as well as you can leverage any cloud host. You could buy a VPS from GCP compute, connect it and deploy apps like you are using Heroku.