I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem.
Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience.
With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things!
GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node).
It can deploy on any machine that can be ssh’d into and runs docker.
GCI provides the missing devx gap between docker swarm and fly.io. Building images locally, getting them onto the target machine, fetching logs, managing different servers, …
Check it out on github, or for more in-depth docs at https://gci.jonas.foo/