Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner account
Hi HN,
I’ve been working with Kubernetes for over a decade, since the alpha days, and was involved in kube-aws project before AWS launched EKS. For the past four years, I’ve been helping friends and small businesses cut costs by running Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud, which I’ve found to be rock solid and by far the best priced provider.
Provisioning a cluster on Hetzner is now straightforward, thanks to tools like k3s and hetzner-k3s, but configuring it for your specific needs still takes time and expertise. I built Edka to make that part easy: spin up a production ready cluster in ~2 minutes, then choose how low level or automated you want to go.
How it works:
Layer 1 – Cluster provisioning - Creates a k3s-based Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner (lightweight, easy to manage, scales well).
Layer 2 – Add-ons - One-click deploy for metrics-server, cert-manager, and various operators; preconfigured for Hetzner, no extra setup needed.
Layer 3 – Applications - Minimal config UIs for apps built on top of add-ons. - Example: Need PostgreSQL? Fill a few fields → platform installs CloudNativePG → provisions HA PostgreSQL with PITR → gives ready to use endpoints. Backups can be restored to any point in time with a click. Quick demo: https://edka.io/apps/
Layer 4 – Deployments - Connect your CI to push container images to a public/private registry. - Edka updates deployments automatically (with semantic versioning rules), supports instant rollbacks, autoscaling, persistent volumes, secrets/env imports, and quick public exposure. Quick demo: https://edka.io/deployments/
Tech stack: TypeScript, React + Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL, Redis, BullMQ, Vault + AWS KMS to encrypted sensitive data.
The platform is still in beta and I’m building it in my spare time, so there are some rough edges, but I’d love feedback from anyone running Kubernetes on Hetzner, exploring alternatives to EKS/GKE/AKS or looking to automate their infrastructure with Kubernetes.
More details: https://edka.io/
Thank you!
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sounds and looks great! There are many good projects out there to deploy Kubernetes https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner, https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s. However, I like that yours is manageable via Dashboard and you install basic applications. Feels way smoother than Terraform templates or CLI tools.
Setting up kubernetes yourself with k3s and deploying a HA database with cnpg is so simple nowadays. It works great until some day you face an issue that you can't fix without diving deep into the details e.g. debugging your CNI or the implementations of specific operators to understand reconciliation errors. I faced countless of these issues such as:
- your Postgres CNPG failed during failover and can't recover on it's own - Postgres WAL archiving suddenly doesn't work anymore after an update. - Cluster networking on some nodes doesn't work anymore due to an incompatibility of kube-proxy and Cilium after an update
Unless it's your core business I'd limit myself to deploying applications on Kubernetes instead of managing Kubernetes itself. At least for use cases where reliability matters.
There are some reasonably priced managed Kubernetes offerings out there. For example syself (https://syself.com) built a managed Kubernetes on Hetzner. The prices are super reasonable. For 300 Euros per month you can enjoy Hetzner prices with an experience that beats AWS.
For those who like k3s and are familiar with it, this looks like a great natural initiative. I never really bought into k3s myself for whatever reason, even on RPis I don’t feel too constrained on resources.
A similar approach I’ve been using is using Syself (running it for about half a year now with no issues). They contributed the Cluster API provider for Hetzner, which is obviously Chad. Of course, I wish CAPI were a bit less involved, but that’s exactly where external help makes sense. I am totally fully sold on CAPI, but then again always need your base cluster.
I still want to set up CAPI on my own, but still preferred having “someone else” host the control plane. With CAPI, though, you have the flexibility to do either.
Also Talos and Omni are cool and pretty chill on Hetzner. Fantastic tools. Still though I just like the "raw-ish" feel to kubeadm and CAPI feels the most "native" solution.
In terms of addons, I have my very curated yaml manifestos. And ArgoCD Application sets. That part is hard for me to replace, but that should defenitely be married with a UI.
The pricing is misleading. You say on the landing page that the free plan is €0 per month, but in reality you still have to pay for the control plane nodes. The cheapest control plane node is €3.29 per month; if you want high-availability - you need to double that.
So in reality you would pay €20 per month for the standard plan and also extra for control plane nodes.
Also, with this Terraform module I can setup a similar setup without paying any extra fee for your service: https://github.com/hcloud-k8s/terraform-hcloud-kubernetes/tree/main
The Terraform module takes care of ingress, certificates, metrics etc
Anyway, congrats for shipping
For anyone interested I am in the last stages of building a course operating around Kube-Hetzner (https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner 3k github stars). Basically a lot of scripts that shows how this works and how to perform backups, restores etc... and a lot of exercises for common use cases and failure troubleshooting. Intentionally NOT abstracting away anything so you can see how this works. Without understanding you are going to get stuck.
Join the waiting list here: https://shipacademy.dev
This certainly looks like a pleasingly straight-forward way to spin up k8s.
I do notice that this deploys onto their cloud offering, which we've (https://lithus.eu) found to be a little shaky in a few places. We deploy clients onto their bare metal line-up which we find to be pretty rock solid. The worst that typically happens is the scheduled restart of an upstream router, which we mitigate via multi-AZ deployments.
That being said, there is a base cluster size under which a custom bare-metal deployment isn't really viable in terms of economics/effort. So I'll definitely keep an eye on this.