Please do a managed Kubernetes next. I couldn't convince any of our customers to switch to Hetzner because they'd need to do "everything themselves". A managed Kubernetes instance would instantly make Hetzner an alternative for at least 75% of our customers. And honestly it's quite a cheap way to earn a bonus on your server instances.

Edit: And if you do manged Kubernetes and managed Kafka Instances the number would go up to like 95%. Oh and those Videos with der8auer? Really awesome to see, do Linus Tech Tipps or Level1Techs next!

Kubeone on Hetzner is honestly one of the smoothest non-managed experiences I've ever had with Kubernetes - better than some managed ones. Includes all of the things Hetzner already provides for Kubernetes (so I'm sure they're working on their own) - internal networking support, load balancers, volumes. And you scale worker nodes with a CRD too.

https://github.com/kubermatic/kubeone/tree/main/examples/ter...

That's wicked cool, thank you. For me and a little more experimental customers, this is a nice option but for the more legacy customers out there, if it doesn't have an SLA, it doesn't exist. I know it doesn't make sense but it's how big companies tend to work.

Oh, I've been there. I just wanted to highlight an outstanding option.

Though I'm sure if you ask and they have the money for it lying around, Kubermatic will sell you an SLA.

I don’t think Hetzner is the company to provide that. The reason they’re so cheap is that they limit themselves to hardware/VPS.

They do have managed offerings.

That product is at least one and a half decade old though. I wouldn't call any of their new products "managed".

Hey y'all -- I'm one of the core maintainers for KubeOne. I'm super happy to hear you had an awesome experience!

For folks wanting to learn more, we have this nice getting started tutorial covering all the cloud providers we support including Hetzner: https://docs.kubermatic.com/kubeone/v1.5/tutorials/creating-...

And for folks asking about SLAs, support, and stuff like that, I recommend checking out our KubeOne Managed Offering: https://www.kubermatic.com/products/managed-kubermatic-kuber...

I'm also happy to answer any questions y'all might have. :)

> Please do a managed Kubernetes next.

If we're taking requests, I would love a Fargate-like service. It would be absolutely fantastic if Hetzner provided a service where users uploaded a Docker image, and Hetzner took care of handling the networking bits and running it, and gather metrics.

Something like this is on my roadmap, would you mind telling me a bit about the metrics and the scale you'd expect? Would you expect always on or more of an ephemeral container?

AWS Fargate / GCP Cloud run

Upload a docker image, specify container size (1cpu 2gb)

go live

scale from 1rps to 1000 rps any time

stateless

pay per request or pay per container

Combining what the original comment was, they also want some AppRunner-style ergonomics -- I'd like to see just how much of cloudwatch/monitoring would be expected to be available. Basic things like CPU and memory aren't too hard but it really does depend on how much of the VM (firecracker/etc) one would expect to be able to see, as well as higher level metrics like (RPS/Errors, etc).

AppRunner, Fargate and Cloud Run have different ergonomics and specifics but thanks for this outline. v1 is likely to be pay per container but other than that feels doable.

> Something like this is on my roadmap,

Superb!

> would you mind telling me a bit about the metrics and the scale you'd expect?

It will depend mostly on what the service offers.

If the service only supports running a single isolated container without any scaling whatsoever then it would be helpful if we could monitor básico stuff like CPU and memory utilization, and also network traffic, free disk space, and also disk IO. If the service supports auto-scaling then it would be helpful to track all resource utilization rates along with all alarms and events involved. Auto-scaling also implies load balancing thus if that's the case then it would also be helpful to track the basic load balancing indicators, as well as request logs.

In the end it really depends on what services you're planning on offering, and how you'll charge for it. As a user I would need to monitor any metric which is directly and indirectly involved in determining cost, and on top of that I need to monitor performance.

> Would you expect always on or more of an ephemeral container?

The most pressing need would be always on containers to be able to go the lift-and-shift onboarding route to managed services, but ephemeral containers sound like function-as-a-service and those are pretty exciting as well.

Thanks for this incredibly detailed answer! All these points make a ton of sense.

Free disk space would imply elastic block storage or something similar so I’ll need to give that a think!

V1 is very likely to be always on so great that it’s the core use case for you!

They could do it like GCP or Scaleway - provide a managed Kubernetes service, and provide managed Knative on top for the Container as a Service service.

Managed k8s also requires stateful services like storage, database and ingress/LB which I recommended Hetzner to build like 8 years ago (community).

Proof: https://forum.hetzner.com/index.php?thread/21421-docker-cont...

Hetzner S3 Storage would be great. I know Hetzner is slow moving when it comes to Software but it's so obvious that they would have explosive growth if they did that and most of it is available as FOSS Software already

So I'm working on adding this on top of Hetzner -- it's service #2 and the beta should be out by the end of the month (Redis is first!) -- if you'd be willing to beta test I'd love to have you try it.

You can find the link in my profile or here[0]

[0]: https://nimbusws.com

IMHO this has to be offered by the platform, not by some other party/intermediary. Of course I could run minio, swift, etc by myself, but this is not the point.

Thanks for sharing this, hopefully after the expansion finishes (and maybe some dedicated servers appear in the US), Hetzner could offer object storage natively!

I have seen the "apps" in image selection in the Hetzner cloud console, so I'm convinced they're at least thinking about going up the value chain.

Hard disagree, this would be awesome. I'm leaving my current position but would have considered this as an unblocker for moving from Azure to Hetzner.

Would you have wanted a hypothetical discussion though (directed at grandparent), I would be up for that. Email in my profile

Thanks for voicing this! I would certainly welcome feedback, email incoming!

They would also have explosive costs and expenses.

There are some other pieces missing. The cluster-autoscaler implementation is quite basic. It doesn't have a way to managing multiple clusters inside the same project and no way to add custom tags. That makes it harder to track resources. The permissions/security is quite simple. Read/write tokens with full permissions on the project is very wide. Adding S3 like service without more security would be interesting. These are the most important ones, but I remember there were a few more nice to have feature (like server groups for scaling up an down and the ability to retrieve the userdata, image and ssh keys for a running server.

Never heard of Level1Tech, just looked them up. Man... These people are so likeable! Great content!

For Kubernetes, maybe give kOps a try. It's quite close to managed. The Hetzner integration is quite good (I spent about 6 months getting it ready for my company). The community support is great also. It still needs autoscaling added though.

If you need managed K8s and Kafka (and pretty much anything else you can self host), my company [1] provides just that with 5x16 real human support.

[1] https://www.ayedo.de

https://symbiosis.host uses Hetzner for their underlying nodes as I understand. It certainly explains them being the cheapest managed Kubernetes offering I've ever seen.

Are you going to be hiring in the US?