ENGINEERING ★ 5 upvotes 2025

Show HN: 10x Kubernetes Cluster on Hetzner Cloud

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @jceb81 on Hacker News:

I created this terraform/tofu module that provisions a k8s/k3s cluster on Hetzner's cloud. If you compare the price to popular hyperscalers you get 10x the value for your buck.

Quick overview of the most important features: - hosts are managed in node pools, like you'd do on AKS, etc - the cluster configuration has been hardened according to k3s hardening guide (https://docs.k3s.io/security/hardening-guide) - the cluster is private by default and can not be accessed from the internet - you decide what to expose - nodes are auto-installing security updates - Kubernetes updates are managed from within the cluster via upgrade plans - an Ansible inventory is generated so commands can be easily invoked on all systems / selected node pools simultaneously - just the bare minimum of charts (hcloud-ccm, hcloud-csi, cilium and system-upgrade-controller) is installed so you can select what is deployed as ingress controller, gitops solution, etc - extensive documentation is provided to configure, maintain and troubleshoot the cluster

Would love to hear your feedback. A number of organizations are already using the module in production.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

In this technical retrospective (2025), @jceb81 shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
2
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
3
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:

HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.

HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 0 comments