About PAASBOX

PAASBOX describes my approach to self-hosting SaaS applications with Gardener, the open-source Kubernetes cluster manager from SAP.

PAASBOX started as a single-box Dokku setup. I was curious if the declarative approach of Kubernetes would fit well with agentic engineering and tried Rancher with RKE, k3s, Talos, and then Gardener on Hetzner Cloud. To my surprise, Gardener with Kyma was by far the best experience. And thanks to newer models like Claude Opus, Fable, and GPT-5.5, it’s even very doable for an indie hacker on the side, like me.

With Gardener and Kyma, I get mature, well-maintained Kubernetes infrastructure without the need for paid managed services. I can quickly launch and hibernate test clusters, and apps get all the surrounding and underlying services needed for operations.

About me

I’m Mitja Martini, a long-term cloud managed services solution designer at T-Systems International GmbH. I’ve been building and running small apps on the side since many years, and started using LLMs for coding even with GPT 3.5 and ChatGPT, later Claude web, and got infected by the vibe coding virus by Mario, Armin, and Peter when they in 2025 shared that they discovered: “OMG it works!”. In January 2026, I realized, I could build a small SaaS App end to end in just one or two days, with spec-driven development. It started a frenzy period of coding many small apps for myself.

Shipping became the bottleneck. With the little Dokku host, it always felt brittle. Deployment is fast, but due to it’s declarative nature, I always feared if I could reliably reproduce things. And the work “around” the app needed different automation. Auth, DNS, transactional email, payment, monitoring, the list goes on.

I assumed, Kubernetes would fit well: Agents can see what happens, the verbosity is even a benefit, they reduce the tedious work of editing yaml files and Kubernetes is just a great orchestrator of all the things, regardless of if they run on the cluster or not. Gardener, like no other free and open source Kubernetes distro I have found, also automates Kubernetes, itself. In a single Garden, I can manage clusters in one or more Hetzner Cloud regions, other cloud platforms if I like, or my homelab, which I will certainly do.

Kyma is a set of modular pieces to to run “enterprise-grade” applications. The enterprise grade is not a joke, Kyma, like Gardener is mainly developed by SAP. And it shows. Even as a tiny enterprise of one, it pays. Everthing feels mature and robust. And Kyma gives me a well-designed and well-rounded toolbox for apps. Even on day one, my tool chain felt better than what I had used, before.

Contact

GitHub: github.com/mitja