Comment by 2start
sounds and looks great! There are many good projects out there to deploy Kubernetes https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne..., 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.
I'm going to second the Syself (https://syself.com) recommendation.
We're running our entire PaaS platform (Sherpa.sh) on top of Hetzner with Syself. We are 5x more affordable than Vercel and a big piece of that is because Syself allows us to operate autoscaling k8s clusters without an army of ops engineers.
We tried hetzner-k3s, and many other solutions. But ran into many of these same problems. Syself on the other hand, has solved all the sticky hardware and networking challenges at scale with their own customer operators. Plus they're support is super responsive and helpful.
The one downside, is they don't have a dashboard yet, so you need to be comfortable in the CLI. But I'm sure they are working on it.
I don't think I would manage kubernetes any other way at this point.