Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner account (edka.io)

437 points by camil ↗ HN
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!

67 comments

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(comment deleted)
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?

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.

Congratulations on the launch!

Is there are plans to support Gitlab and gitlab registry (or any registry) ?

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.
Great job. Love the project
Is this deploying K3s or full kubernetes with a control vs worker plane on different instances?
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.
Typo: One Cluser always free
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/tr...

The Terraform module takes care of ingress, certificates, metrics etc

Anyway, congrats for shipping

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.

Why would I use Edka vs using Linode's free Kubernetes offering?
exactly what i was looking for. I will give it a shot !
(comment deleted)
Has anybody found a good way to use encrypted disks with Hetzner yet?
Am i the only one who is confused about "Hetzner" in the title and "AWS KMS" in the body?
typo on the website: one cluser always free
Site doesn't answer how storage is 'solved'. Is this solution uses local folder provisioning when using PostgreSQL for example.
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 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?
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.
Given how rarely they offer specific software solutions and at what pace, I would say 5+ years from now or never.
is there a selfhosted version of this ?