WIwilly__·Feb 20, 2026
are you aware of https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ?
I am using it and I can wholeheartedly recommend.
In I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructurevitobotta
hetzner-k3s
Crystal2021–2026
vitobotta / hetzner-k3s
hetzner-k3s
The easiest and fastest way to create production-ready Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner Cloud
14Distinct people
22Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The easiest and fastest way to create production-ready Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner Cloud
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Also highly recommended https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
davidgl used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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- mysticaltech/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year22 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-08-07 12:29:53 UTC to 2026-02-20 10:17:49 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
22 sourcesAnyone here using
https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
Or
https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...
For a K3S cluster? Would love to hear any experience. Thanks!
In Migrating from AWS to HetznerI'd say rent a hetzner vps and use hetzner-k3s
https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
Then you are off to races. you can add more nodes etc later to give it a try.
In Litestream v0.5.0Those servers are mainly designed for enterprise use cases. For hobby projects, I can understand why someone would choose Hetzner over AWS.
For enterprise environments, however, there is much more to consider. One of the biggest costs you face is your operations team. If you go with Hetzner, you essentially have to rebuild a wide range of infrastructure components yourself (WAF, globally distributed CDN, EFS, RDS, EKS, Transit Gateways, Direct Connect and more).
Of course, you can create your own solutions for all of these. At my company, a mid-size enterprise, we once tried to do exactly that.
WAF: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
CDN: Hetzner Nodes with Cache in Finnland, USA and GER
RDS: Self-hosted MySQL from Bitnami
EFS: https://github.com/rook/rook
EKS: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
and 20+ more moving targets of infra
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software stack and support systems
The result was hiring more than 10 freelancers in addition to 5 of our DevOps engineers to build it all and handling the complexity of such a setup and the keep everything up-to-date, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, our AWS team, consisting of only three people working with Terraform, proved far more cost-effective. Not in terms of dollars per CPU core, but in terms of average per project spending dollars once staff costs and everything were included.
I think many of the HN posts that say things like "I saved 90% of my infra bill by moving from AWS to a single Hetzner server" are a bit misleading.
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
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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.
Does anyone know how this compares to using https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ?
In Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner accountProbably 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.
In Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner accountI just went thru this exercise of setting up k3s on hetzner by using this: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/
does this help?
In Show HN: Canine – A Heroku alternative built on KubernetesHetzner-k3s v2.2.0 has been released
Check it out at https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s - it's the easiest and fastest way to set up Kubernetes clusters in Hetzner Cloud!
3 points · Open discussioni was actually playing with hetzner and k3s over the weekend and found this https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s to be super useful.
In I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't EitherAlso highly recommended https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
In AWS and Azure Are at Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than HetznerNew record: I created a 300-node Kubernetes cluster in 11 minutes
This is with the new version not yet released of my tool https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s.
It uses k3s as Kubernetes flavor and Hetzner Cloud as provider. For this test I used extremely high concurrency so the tool hung twice in the middle of the process because I was hitting the Hetzner API too hard, so I had to interrupt it and continue.
Excluding the time it paused/hung due to the API, I calculated around 11 minutes total for the cluster creation. This includes:
- creating all the resources (cloud instances, firewall, load balancer for the Kubernetes API)
- deploying k3s to the control plane (3 masters) and the 297 worker nodes
- installing the Hetzner Cloud Controller Manager, to link K8s nodes to the cloud instances as seen by the Hetzner control panel and be able to provision load balancers out of the box
- installing the He
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tzner CSI driver, to be able to provision block storage volumes out of the box
- installing the Cluster Autoscaler, to allow configuring autoscaling node pools
- installing the Rancher System Upgrade Controller, to handle k3s upgrades very easily
I believe this is a world record, or at least I have never heard of a tool managed or not to create clusters that comes even close to mine in terms of speed. Am I wrong? I would be curious to hear if there is a tool even faster than mine.
Of course not many people need to create clusters with 300 nodes from the get go, but it was a fun experiment. In the version I will release in the coming few weeks (v2.0) I will likely limit concurrency to more sane levels to reduce the risk of hitting the Hetzner API too hard, although most people will create small clusters to begin with. During my testing, I was able to create a cluster without hanging etc with max 100 nodes. Beyond that it almost always hangs and there are retries to create/power on cloud instances. So yeah I am going to limit the concurrency just in case to perhaps 10 or 20 servers per time for real life use.
What do you think of this? Let me know! I am curious to hear feedback or any comments on the subject :)
(For Kubernetes users mainly) I need your help/advice with a business idea
Hi all, if you already use Kubernetes in any capacity or are you interested in it, would you mind spending a few minutes voting in a quick poll and hopefully answering a few questions? I would appreciate your help a ton because it would help me make the right decision and hopefully avoid a costly waste of time.
Everything is in a Github discussion at https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s/discussions/296. A huge thank you in advance if you can help with this!
2 points · Open discussionV1.1.5 of Hetzner-k3s (my Kubernetes installer for Hetzner Cloud) is out
The new release introduces more customisation options for cluster/service CIDRs, cluster DNS, updated manifests for CSI/CCM/autoscaler, and a couple of improvement for creating large clusters. Check it out at https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s
If you are already familiar with this tool, I'd love to know how it's worked for you so far. :)
4 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 22 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.