Edka is live. Provision a K3s cluster on Hetzner, wire up Git-based deployments, and deploy your application. Hetzner resources run in your own account; you keep kubectl access to every component. One cluster is free, no credit card required. Sign up.
Why We Built It
What Teams Told Us
“Cloud gives you a lot, but it gets too complex and too expensive very quickly.”
“Platforms as a Service feel great, until we start getting high traffic and need to scale. Then it becomes too expensive and hard to migrate out.”
“We’re five developers; we’d rather ship features than learn Kubernetes internals.”
“We want to own our infrastructure, but we don’t want to manage it.”
“We have to put together too many tools to get a working deployment pipeline.”
We kept hearing these stories and built the middle ground: a cluster you own, on infrastructure you own, without assembling and operating the toolchain yourself.
Key Advantages
- Provisioning — Provision a hardened K3s cluster on Hetzner in minutes, then manage it through the web interface and Git.
- Infrastructure ownership — Hetzner resources stay in your own account, with direct provider billing and a path to add dedicated Metal servers for sustained workloads.
- Self-Service Deployments — Push to Git, run automated tests, get a preview environment for each pull request, approve and merge the PR and the platform automates the entire release pipeline.
- Extensible Add-ons — Choose from preconfigured tools for databases, ingress controllers, observability, and CI/CD.
- Open Standards — The platform builds on Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects like k3s, Flux, cert-manager, CloudNativePG, External Secrets and more. These standards make skills and tooling transferable.
- Transparent Operations — You can inspect and audit every component deployed to your cluster.
How It Works
-
Provision — The platform deploys a hardened K3s Kubernetes cluster with production ready defaults. In most cases, you only have to set the cluster name, region and the size of the cluster to have a production ready cluster.
-
Connect A GitHub Repo — GitHub integration enables GitOps-based deployments.
-
Select Add-ons — Pick from a curated catalog of tools required by your application. Options include PostgreSQL, Redis, Envoy Gateway (Gateway API), cert-manager, External Secrets, and more.
-
Sync your secrets - Use an external secrets management provider like Doppler, AWS Secrets Manager, 1Password or HashiCorp Vault to manage your secrets. We support External Secrets to provision secrets from these providers into your cluster.
-
Connect your Container Registry — The platform supports GitHub Container Registry, Docker Hub, AWS ECR, Google Artifact Registry, a custom registry, or an in-cluster registry powered by Zot.
-
Deploy — Commit to your repository and Edka builds the image with zero-config CI based on Railpack (or your own Dockerfile), runs tests, pushes to your registry, and deploys it. GitHub Actions remains supported for custom pipelines.
- Each pull request gets a preview environment automatically created for you.
- Merging a pull request triggers the production container image build and push to registry
- Flux automatically detects the new image and deploys it to your production cluster
-
Operate — Monitor, scale, and roll back applications from the dashboard, or drop to kubectl for advanced operations.
Demo Application
To demonstrate how the platform works in practice, we’ve built StartMeUp, a demo stack based on a slightly modified version of Pagoda - Go-based web application starter kit. This demo reflects the architecture and operational concerns of many modern SaaS products.
Demo Video
Stack Overview
- Web, API, and background workers (Go, Echo framework)
- PostgreSQL with Point in Time Recovery (PITR) and S3 backups
- River for durable, transactional background job processing
- Database schema management and migrations with Ent
- Preview environments for every Pull Request
- GitHub Container Registry for storing Docker images and Helm charts
- Declarative infrastructure management using Flux
- Automatic HTTPS via cert-manager and Let’s Encrypt
- DNS records stored in Git and synchronized with Cloudflare
- Secure secrets management with Doppler and External Secrets
The stack ships with observability tooling: metrics, retained logs, and alerts. See Observability. The demo is now open sourced to help teams quickly bootstrap their own deployments. Check it out: github.com/edkadigital/startmeup
We are also working on preconfigured stack templates for other ecosystems, including Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby. These will provide ready to use configurations and one click deployments.
Prerequisites
To try the platform, you’ll only need a Hetzner Cloud account and a project API token. You can create a project API token in the Hetzner Cloud Console.
To try the demo, you’ll need the following:
- A Hetzner Cloud project and API token
- A Doppler project (or another supported secrets provider like Vault or AWS Secrets Manager)
- A registered domain name that you control
- A container registry (currently supported: GitHub Container Registry, Docker Hub, AWS ECR, and Google Artifact Registry)
- An S3 compatible storage bucket for PostgreSQL backups and WAL (e.g., AWS S3, Wasabi, MinIO)
- A GitHub repository containing your application source code and manifests
Our Relationship with Hetzner
We have no formal affiliation with Hetzner. Our decision to build on their infrastructure is based on years of successful production usage, competitive pricing, and excellent reliability. All deployed workloads run on Kubernetes, which is portable across most cloud providers. Migration is straightforward and we’ll provide tools to allow fast migrations or hybrid cloud setups.
Help Us Shape the Roadmap
The roadmap follows what teams ask for. Need support for a specific stack, an add-on, or a registry or secrets provider we don’t list yet? Tell us, and we’ll prioritize accordingly.
Thank you for trying Edka.