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About paasbox

paasbox is three things, in this order.

  1. An open-source CLI and the components behind it. paasbox garden up turns one Hetzner Cloud project into a Gardener landscape that creates, upgrades, backs up and deletes Kubernetes clusters for you. The CLI and the Gardener extensions for Hetzner are Apache-2.0; the remaining components are being published under the same licence. It is free, and support for it is best effort. Your own Gardener is the starting point.
  2. Two live courses. One teaches you to stand up and run that landscape in your own project. The other teaches the method this project is built with: how to trust infrastructure a coding agent wrote when nobody read all of it. Training has both.
  3. Clusters run for you. If you want clusters and not a landscape, I run a small landscape of my own and can run clusters for you on it, best effort, in business hours. It is a courtesy for people who ask, not a product built to scale. Pricing has the numbers.

Why I built it

Section titled “Why I built it”

I build and run small SaaS apps on the side. After Dokku, Rancher with RKE, k3s and Talos, I settled on Gardener on Hetzner Cloud, and it was the best of them by a wide margin. With models like Claude Opus and Fable doing the YAML work, fleet-grade Kubernetes became something one person could run on the side.

The bring-up was the hard part. Standing up a Gardener landscape by hand takes days of reading and a long list of preconditions. I wrote the deployment for my own landscape, tested it in a lab against real servers until it worked unattended, and then packaged it so that the only thing you need is a Hetzner project and a token. That package is the CLI. The extensions Gardener needs for Hetzner are the same ones my landscape runs.

Why Gardener

Section titled “Why Gardener”

Gardener is Kubernetes that runs Kubernetes. It is the control plane behind SAP’s own Kubernetes service, STACKIT’s cloud and T-Systems’ cloud offering, run by people who have operated thousands of clusters for years. The design that lets a platform team run hundreds of clusters uniformly is the same design that lets one team, or one person, run a few of them without a platform team. A shoot’s control plane is a set of pods on the seed; only its workers are real servers. That is what makes the fifth cluster cheap.

Why open source first

Section titled “Why open source first”

A landscape you run yourself has no vendor in the path. The CLI publishes what my own production runs, and my production is the proof that it works, not a special case. The courses exist because the bring-up being one command does not make Gardener simple to operate, and two weeks with someone who has done it is faster than the docs. The clusters I run for others exist because some people asked.

About me

Section titled “About me”

I am Mitja Martini, a solution designer for cloud managed services at T-Systems International, and I build and run small apps on the side. In 2025 I started building with coding agents, and by early 2026 I could build a small SaaS app end to end in a day or two. Shipping it, not building it, was the slow part: auth, DNS, transactional email, payments, monitoring, deployment. Kubernetes turned out to be a good place to run all of that, and Gardener automates Kubernetes itself. paasbox is how I make that available to other people in the same position.

paasbox is deliberately small. I run it the way I would want a tool I depend on to be run: with the numbers public, without promises I cannot measure, and without describing anything as available before it is.

Contact

Section titled “Contact”

The contact page has every channel. The short version: