Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner account

81 comments

·August 15, 2025

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!

Visit

adamcharnock

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.

MaKey

What's the difference to a well established tool like kops (https://github.com/kubernetes/kops), which also supports Hetzner?

camil

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.

abound

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...

worldsayshi

Does anyone know how this compares to using https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ?

andix

I guess UI and commercial support.

andix

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!

trolla

This module is way better https://github.com/hcloud-k8s/terraform-hcloud-kubernetes/tr...

I'm using it right now

camil

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.

andix

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.

bflesch

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.

camil

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.

bflesch

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...

physix

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.

adamcharnock

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@...

VoidWhisperer

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)

physix

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.

VoidWhisperer

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'

JanMa

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.

camil

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...

physix

me too

marcosscriven

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?

betaby

Site doesn't answer how storage is 'solved'. Is this solution uses local folder provisioning when using PostgreSQL for example.

camil

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.

pwmtr

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)

mfrye0

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.

adamcharnock

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

rumblefrog

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

camil

Hello there, sorry for that I will look into it right now.

SCHiM

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?

camil

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.

figassis

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS

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...