Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner account
edka.ioHi 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!
What a great fortune to reach top of HN and get product feedback, then get rate limited by GitHub ( that was an easy fix though...) Then Hetzner gets a partial outage, failing to create new instances, causing most of the new cluster to get stuck in "creating" mode. Thanks everyone for the interest, I was not expecting this from a side project and I'll do my best to improve the platform in the future and address all feedback received.
It happens to almost all of us :) No worries, you did great! Thanks for sharing your project with us
Thank you for your kind words! I really appreciate it.
What's the difference to a well established tool like kops (https://github.com/kubernetes/kops), which also supports Hetzner?
Probably the easiest out there is https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s. There are many options, depending on how low level you want to go. Hetzner terraform project is probably the most complex and complete, but it takes time to configure all those. The main idea was to provide simplification, not just to Kubernetes provisioning in Hetzner, but also to the most common apps and tools that extend Kubernetes capabilities, like ingress controllers, prometheus, elasticsearch, databases and so on.
There's also Talos, which also also supports Hetzner [1] and is similarly streamlined. Not quite the same idea but very similar.
[1] https://www.talos.dev/v1.10/talos-guides/install/cloud-platf...
Does anyone know how this compares to using https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ?
I guess UI and commercial support.
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.
There is this project to deploy k3s to Hetzner via Terraform: https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...
It's not the smoothest thing I've ever used, but it's all self hosted and everything can be fixed with some Terraform or SSH.
Great to see some managed Kubernetes on Hetzner!
This module is way better https://github.com/hcloud-k8s/terraform-hcloud-kubernetes/tr...
I'm using it right now
I agree, this is probably the most complete solution out there. My intentions with this project are to provide various layers of abstraction, not only for Kubernetes provisioning, but also for the most common apps and tools that are usually extending the Kubernetes capabilities and also allow some low level configuration options.
Thanks for the feedback. I've stumbled upon it when it when the project was quite new, and it looked promising.
kube-hetzner seems to be a bit stuck, they have a big backlog for the next major release, but it might never happen.
I cant seem to figure out where this company is located and if it is a scam or not. Website has no imprint, no contact address. There is one email address in the privacy statement but it is "redacted by cloudflare". Also in privacy statement it says "Edka Digital S.L." but no idea which country it is registered it.
For me it does not pass the smell test. No physical address, no idea who is running it, no idea if company is indeed registered or not. The pricing FAQ at least talks about VAT and I assume it is EU VAT but could be anything.
Hello there, as I mentioned in the post, I build this as a side project by my self and I'm running it as a freelancer registered in Spain, you can check my VAT number ESY1848661G. I was planning to collect some feedback and honestly didn't expect such interest in the project. I will make the necessary adjustments to the privacy policy and terms of service. When I started this, I had in mind to convert it into a company, but I'm still running it as a freelancer. Thanks for your feedback! I will correct my mistake.
Hey, thanks for your immediate reply. Congrats for starting your own business. If you're Spanish-based maybe something like "aviso legal" at [1] or "legal notice" (imprint) at hetzner [2] is needed so people can validate that you/your company actually exist.
I'm not familiar with Spanish S.L. (Sociedad Limitada) but it seems to be a private, share-based legal entity with minimum 3000 EUR share capital and at least one director. It seems the share capital does not need to be paid in full [3] which is a risk for potential customers if things go wrong.
If you're based in a EU country I'd suggest to also clearly communicate all these legal information, because it's easier for potential customers to build trust into your services.
[1] https://www.hola.com/aviso-legal/ [2] https://www.hetzner.com/legal/legal-notice/ [3] https://www.lawants.com/en/sl-spain/#:~:text=minimum%20share...
Thanks! I made a quick update to the Privacy Policy and Terms of use. I will review all legal documents in depth in the following days. Meanwhile, you can check my legal entity informations here: https://www.einforma.com/rapp/ficha/empresas?id=dWSG1MwtU312...
Also here: https://ceo.oepm.es/detalleExpediente?numExp=N0486066
Personally, I trust companies more that put a name and face on their website too. So I can check if the person behind it is real (mostly using LinkedIn).
Even it is easy to find, I also have a verified LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilblanaru/
Name and face are good soft indicators, but hard to verify without previous connection via existing social network. Company registration info can be verified.
I have yet to see a guide to automate k8s on Hetzner's beefy bare metal instances. True, you want cattle, but being able to include some bare metal instance with amazing CPUs and memory would be great, and I do just that. My clusters include both cloud and bare metal instances. In the past I had used Hetzner virtual switch to create a shared L2 network between cloud and bare metal nodes. Now I just use tailscale.
But the TF and other tools are using the API to add and kill nodes, if you could pass a class of nodes to those tools that they know can't create but are able to wipe and rebuild, this would be ideal.
Would CAPH solve your issue? https://github.com/syself/cluster-api-provider-hetzner you would wire up cluster autoscaler to point to it using clusterapi https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/a9cb59fdd2dd88...
post it on the Hetzner subreddit, they regularly watch it :)
It’s a little off topic, but to mention Raku now has support for the Hetzner API https://raku.land/zef:wayland/WWW::CloudHosting::Hetzner
That way we can use Raku as a scripting language for deployment.
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-hetzne... 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
My biggest issue with k8s on Hetzner is that there is no way of going from tiny (1 machine) to medium (10-100 machines) purely on bare metal. I was able to get Gateway API to provide ingress nodes after a bit of Envoy tinkering, but storage is an issue. You can't run Ceph Rook on a single machine (too heavy,) and I couldn't find a think local volume wrapper that lets me easily migrate from local volume management to distributed.
Feels like there should be a PV daemon that can do local, and transparent migrations and is lightweight enough to run on a single machine. Once my PV has been migrated to Ceph, the proxy could configure itself away from that job.
I just use microk8s in Ubuntu on hetzner takes around 1 minute to set it up
Could you explain:
1) What are the limitations of the scaling you do? Can I do this programmatically? I.e. send some requests to get additional pods of a specific type online?
2) What have you done in terms of security hardening? you mention hardened pods/cluster, but specifically, did you do pentest? Just follow best practice? Periodic scans? Stress tests?
Thanks for your questions! 1) The platform provides a control plane to help you deploy the cluster on your own Hetzner account, so you are in control of resources and pay direct usage costs to Hetzner. 2) Because you have full access to kubernetes cluster and it runs on your own Hetzner account, the security of the cluster is a shared responsibility and you can fine tune the configuration according to your requirements. The platform security is totally our responsibility. We try to follow best practices and internal penetration tests were conducted, but we're still in beta and try to see if there's interest for such product before launching the stable version.
An Hetzner employee once told me that they’ve been trying for years to develop their own Kubernetes-as-a-service solution, I wonder if they’re still working on that or not.
Years?! what. the. actual. fuck
Well, I guess from a platform that has no intrinsic IAM offering, I take that back, I guess keeping track of whose special console password is the current one is, in fact, hard work
This is a great idea. I really like it!
We considered reaching out in May, but held back because we want to run on bare metal.
Any chance to get this provisioned on bare metal at Hetzner?
We have K8S running on bare metal there. It's a slog to get it all working, but for our use case, having a dedicated 10G LAN between nodes (and a bare metal Cassandra cluster in the same rack) makes a big difference in performance.
Also, from a cost perspective. We run AX41-NVMe dedicated servers that cost us about EUR 64 per server with a 10G LAN, all in the same rack. Getting the same horsepower using Cloud instances I guess would be a CCX43, which costs almost double.
I have a docker swarm in Hetzner with cloud instances and VM in bare metal (proxmox host): the good is that I am using almost the same cloud init script to create those Ubuntu nodes (both Proxmox and Hetzner cloud instances support cloud-init).
I use wireguard to have those nodes connected together
We're setting up a data-heavy client at the moment who has a similar need. We're working with Hetzner's custom solutions team to provision a multi-AZ setup, with 25G networking and 100G AZ interconnects. Link in bio if you want to chat, email is adam@...
Are you asking if it can provision bare metal servers with hetzner in a similar way to what it is doing with cloud servers, or if it can manage clusters on your hetzner bare metal servers (in the case of the second, a tool like Rancher might be better)
I was thinking more of the former, whereby I "bring my own servers".
I haven't really thought it through yet, whether that even makes sense.
That might be a bit challenging unless they sort out an integration directly with hetzner as I don't think their API supports anything related to bare metal provisioning, just cloud and 'storage boxes'
Cluster-api project is what you want. It's the holy grail of cluster lifecycle.
Any plans to expand further than Hetzner? They're pretty restrictive on certain usages(e.g VPNs), I'd be really interested in support for Datapacket for example.
Was innitially designed for Hetzner, but they way it has been bult, will allow expanding to any provider. Especially to providers that offer their own Kubernetes distribution.
Hetzner is working on their own managed offering too, but it doesn't seem like anyone has an idea when it will land.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/18yhy89/seems_like...
Considering how bad their object storage offering is, I'd never use this I think
I am having no issues with their object storage
Hetzner subreddit is filled with posts of issues
Love how focussed this is.
I would have never guessed that there's an overlap between the circle of people wanting to run a prod workload on a K8s cluster and folks that need a GUI to set up and manage a K8s cluster would be that big but looks like I might be wrong.
> I would have never guessed that there's an overlap between the circle of people wanting to run a prod workload on a K8s cluster and folks that need a GUI to set up and manage a K8s cluster would be that big but looks like I might be wrong.
Count how many GKE ad EKS users are out there?
Surely the appeal is more that someone will fix things if your k8s installation breaks?
how do you create instances i hetzner? with cloud init?
I created for me some scripts to add node (Hetzner instance with Ubuntu) in a Docker Swarm, and I would really love to find something as you did but for Docker Swarm
Site doesn't answer how storage is 'solved'. Is this solution uses local folder provisioning when using PostgreSQL for example.
Sorry for that, I wasn't expecting such interest. There are still undocumented parts, but happy to answer any question. It uses https://github.com/hetznercloud/csi-driver to attach persistent volumes to PostgreSQL pods.
I wonder how trustworthy hetzner distributed storage is. I always saw hetzner as just a control plane to allocate bare compute and nothing more, I wouldn’t necessarily trust their managed storage solutions, but I also don’t have much experience with it.
Honestly I’m kindof surprised that something like rook it not used instead, but I guess it is easier to trust hetzner storage and hope for the best.
If you are looking for Postgres on Hetzner, you may want to check out Ubicloud.
We host in various bare metal providers, including Hetzner. (I am the lead engineer building Ubicloud PostgreSQL, so if you have questions I can answer them)
What is the difference with Syself.com ? I was looking into them recently ?
I didn't have the chance to test their platform yet, but I expect it to be a mature product. My intentions with this platform are to make it more accessible to developers and small companies that do not have Kubernetes knowledge yet or want to spin clusters fast for development, testing etc.
This is incredibly timely. I've been an AWS customer for 10+ years and have been having a tough time with them lately. Looking at potentially moving off and considering options.
My theory is that with terraform and a container based infra, that it should be pretty easier with Claude Code to migrate wherever.
This is exactly what we [1] do! We migrate clients out of AWS and into Hetzner bare-metal k8s clusters, and then we also become the client's DevOps team (typically for a lot less than Amazon charges)
I will say that there is a fair bit of lifting required to spin up a k8s cluster on bare metal, particularly for things such as monitoring and distributed block storage (we use OpenEBS). I would ballpark it as a small number of months.
It is likely easier on their cloud offering, but we've found that to be a little less reliable than we would hope.
Happy to chat more: adam@...
[1] https://lithus.eu
I'm using AWS for small k8s clusters. I stay away from most of the "managed" AWS products except S3 and ECR. My k8s stack is packer + tofu + k3s + zfs: It's easy, concise, self managed, and costs are easy to predict.
Am i the only one who is confused about "Hetzner" in the title and "AWS KMS" in the body?
Thanks for the feedback! Didn't plan to bring any confusion with that. The AWS KMS is used by the platform to encrypt/decrypt sensitive data before/after storing it in Vault and is part of the tech stack used to develop the platform.
it's more the thing, that if you put secrets on AWS, you are STILL dependent on AWS even if you run things on hetzner. It would be better, if you find a solution for secrets maintenance which runs on hetzner..
What are the connectivity options between heztner dedicated servers? I see they allow you to pay to have in a single rack, with a dedicated switch. But does that introduce a risk of single point of failure in the rack power or switch?
Congrats on shipping! I see that you have WordPress as a pro app. As someone who pays for WP hosting, what I'd like to see there is the ability to "fork" a WP instance, media, DB, everything, with a new hostname, that I can try things, updates, etc.
Thanks! Wordpress will be available for free, it is not currently finished. Probably next week will be ready.
Is this deploying K3s or full kubernetes with a control vs worker plane on different instances?
It is ready to use Kubernetes setup with separate control plane and node pools
k3s does support running separate control plane and worker node pools. It's not just for toy-project clusters, or single node clusters. k3s can also power rather big clusters.
I tried to deploy a small cluster in the US VA region, but the cluster status kept flipping between Failed and Creating with no clear way of troubleshooting it: 7ad975fb-3c8e-47a9-b03d-9e6bec81f0db
Hello there, sorry for that I will look into it right now.
Congratulations on the launch!
Is there are plans to support Gitlab and gitlab registry (or any registry) ?
Thank you! Yes, both are planned. The registry will be a very easy implementation.
I wonder how long before Hetzner adds something like managed Kubernetes to their native product line. They already have S3 compatible object storages, load balancers and more.
In case others were curious https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/supported-ac...
https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/load-balancers/overview#:~:te...
Given how rarely they offer specific software solutions and at what pace, I would say 5+ years from now or never.
No idea about the timing but I imagine it's coming.
Would make a lot of sense, especially if you can combine it with the hardware servers. You could get a lot of grunt in your cluster for a lot less than for example AWS.
Typo: One Cluser always free
Fixed, thanks!
Has anybody found a good way to use encrypted disks with Hetzner yet?
If you need disk encryption on Hetzner, I built a Terraform module that sets up a Kubernetes cluster with encrypted disks enabled by default: https://github.com/hcloud-k8s/terraform-hcloud-kubernetes
What is the threat model you want to mitigate using encryption at rest? Is it that a physical disk is not properly wiped after usage? Then you could just use luks and store the key anywhere else, e.g. another machine or an external volume…
Their installer script supports LUKS.
Setup dropbear, and have another encrypted instance that runs a cron that runs a script every minute to check for the dropbear port on all instances and sshes in and passes the key to boot.
This is what I do for fastcomments anyway for ovh and hetzner
To answer from a Kubernetes perspective: Both OpenEBS Mayastor and LocalZFS now support disk encryption.
Encrypted disks are easily setup with archlinux + LUKS + tinySSH, you can remote unlock via SSH.
When I was looking into this, I instead setup Proxmox on Hetzner (which you can do natively from ISO).
From there it was much easier just using it for whatever I wanted, including K3S
This looks great! Haven't tried it yet, but should I presume this also does k8s and OS updates for me? Or how managed is it?
Thanks for the feedback! The platform is mostly self service, but it is very easy to upgrade the Kubernetes version, just change the version in the cluster configuration. For OS updates, you can replace the nodes and it will automatically pick the latest OS image from Hetzner. I also run it isolated for some small companies, as a fully managed service, so that option is available as well.
A bit off topic, but you might want to rethink the name. It is very close to EDEKA, the largest German supermarket chain. They have a very large IT division (https://it.edeka) and judging from the name of your project I was expecting it to be one of their projects.
Well, I had this since 2011, and in 2018 a new disease was labeled EDKA ( that is the first result you get when you google for edka). I became aware about the german supermarket few years after also. I could consider it at some point, but is very hard to find something available these days...
me too
Why would I use Edka vs using Linode's free Kubernetes offering?
This was designed for Hetzner, which I still believe has the best offer on the market comparing price, performance and stability. On top of that, the platform offers some ready to deploy add-ons that simplify the configuration after the initial cluster provisioning.
What Hetzner-specific functionality did you need to design that you wouldn’t need in a “deploy to arbitrary set of VMs” scenario?
Hetzner was an easy choice because you can attach persistent volumes, expose services using their load balancers, servers are fast and easy to provision and they probably have the best pricing. I run multiple clusters in Hetzner for over 4 years now and only had minor issues. Sometimes they do not have enough instances on a specific region, sometimes provisioning new instances can be delayed or they send emails to reboot the instances due to patches to their hypervisors. But most of the times runs stable. Few of my clusters have 100% uptime for more than 2 years.
Linode pricing is probably 3-4x more expensive than Hetzner, who does not offer managed kubernetes.
Great job. Love the project
Thank you!
exactly what i was looking for. I will give it a shot !
Thank you! Please feel free to ask any questions.
typo on the website: one cluser always free
is there a selfhosted version of this ?
You can just install k3s maybe?
Great job!
I can't find this Spanish (?) company in the company register and there are none of the legally required information on the website. Not very trustworthy for a SaaS that stores your data and access keys. I'm confident that this is only a startup "day one" issue, but in times of increased scam and extortion can I be sure? Nope.
Hello there! Fair enough. As I mentioned in the original post, I built this as a side project, by myself, and I run it as a freelancer registered in Spain. It is not hard to find my public profile. You can check my Spanish VAT number, ESY1848661G. This is still in beta and currently looking to collect feedback and see if there is any interest in the market, before scaling it to a company. Thank you!
Updated the privacy policy with missing details. You can also check officially here https://www.einforma.com/rapp/ficha/empresas?id=dWSG1MwtU312... Also here: https://ceo.oepm.es/detalleExpediente?numExp=N0486066
Great work. Just tried to email support@ and it bounced.
Thanks for letting me know. Apparently there was a wrong permission set for the Google group.
off topic: k8s aside, what are people using to receive webhooks from github/gitea/gitlab and do builds/deploys? is the generally accepted way to put deploy credentials into CI secrets and do it that way?
I'm sure for 10 people you'll get 15 answers, but for my money OIDC is the way, the truth, and the light. GitHub and GitLab offer it, one can have federated auth from within a k8s Pod to anything that trusts OIDC, and realistically one can do it from anything that has intrinsic identity. That's also how AWS Identity Anywhere works, just with more X509
I really loved this talk about using Let's Encrypt for IAM Anywhere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1hXUcBMf1Q
I have personally also set up EKS Anywhere <https://github.com/aws/eks-anywhere#readme> with OIDC, so one need not have a "smart cloud" to get that done, but it places the burden upon security the cluster's identity upon the operator https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2302594
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> if you want high-availability - you need to double that.
Triple. 1 and 2 nodes will give failure allowance of zero.
Actually you want 3 nodes for high availability, two will do you nothing good
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Are you blowing out the birthday candles on someone else's cake?
$5/month per core for self hosted? Thats way too expensive.