Documentation
paasbox is an open-source CLI that gives you a Gardener landscape in your own Hetzner project. The first group below is about that. The rest of these pages describe the clusters I run for people who would rather not run a landscape: what they include, how they behave, what they cost, and how you leave. Most of it also describes what a shoot on your own landscape does, because it is the same Gardener and the same Hetzner extensions.
Your own Gardener
Section titled “Your own Gardener”Your own GardenerInstall the CLI, one Hetzner project and one command. What you need, the DNS decision, sizes and prices, a dedicated server, day two.
How it is built on GardenerThe garden, the seed and your project. The open-source Hetzner components and their licences. What is deliberately left out.
Operated in the openHow this project is built with agents: what they may do, what only I do, the drills every change runs, and what I publish each month.
TrainingTwo live courses: your own managed Kubernetes on Hetzner, and Agentic DevOps, the method this project is built with.
Signing in and hosted namesThe browser sign-in with a device code, the team token and where it lives, and the free names under your team's paasbox.app label, with their limits and the alternatives.
Clusters run for you
Section titled “Clusters run for you”If you want clusters and not a landscape, I can run them for you on my own landscape. These pages are the reference for that.
QuickstartYour first cluster in about ten minutes: sign up, connect a Hetzner token, compose, start, kubectl get nodes.
What's includedEvery feature in one table: what comes from Gardener, what paasbox adds, which kind of cluster gets it, and where to read how.
What you bring & what we runThe exact split of responsibility and cost: your nodes in your Hetzner project, the control plane operated on the landscape.
From token to clusterWhat happens after you connect your Hetzner API token: the provisioning timeline and what appears in your project.
Pricing & billingTwo kinds of cluster: test at €49 a month or €0.15 an hour, production at €99. What Hetzner bills directly, spend caps, fair use.
Operate
Section titled “Operate”Node poolsOn-demand pools are resized and autoscaled. Pooled pools are your adopted servers, never deleted. How they behave and mix.
Adopt your serversBring servers with the old Hetzner price in as worker nodes: wiped and reinstalled in place, never deleted, price preserved.
Private clustersWorkers without public addresses, one NAT gateway per cluster in your project, a stable egress IP, allow-lists, and a host firewall on every node.
Maintenance & upgradesThe window you choose, what updates automatically, what rolls a node, and how adopted servers are upgraded without being deleted.
HibernationPut a cluster to sleep, by hand or on a schedule: worker spend stops, the hourly meter drops to €0, state survives, wake in minutes.
Monitoring & alertsHealth in the console for every cluster, the production cluster's monitoring stack, federation into your own Prometheus, and what a test cluster does not have.
Backups & availabilityContinuous etcd backups, what the production cluster's control plane changes, the drilled rebuild, and why a control-plane pause does not stop your apps.
Limits & fair useThe footprint every cluster includes, the limits that exist for technical reasons, and what happens at each of them.
Regionsnbg1 is live, fsn1 and hel1 open on demand. What a region determines, and how to pick one when you have adopted servers.
Access & identity
Section titled “Access & identity”Access your clusterShort-lived admin kubeconfigs from the console or the API: how they work, using them in CI, and what they do and do not include.
Bring your own identity providerLog in with your own OIDC provider: named users, group-based RBAC, MFA, and immediate offboarding.
Teams & API keysTeams own everything: roles, invitations, scoped API keys for CI, and the audited activity log.
Billing
Section titled “Billing”Grandfathered pricing, explainedWhy normal Kubernetes loses your old Hetzner rate, how adopted servers keep it, and what that is worth per month.
Billing & spend controlsThe €5 signup credit, the awake-hours meter, spend caps that hibernate instead of delete, dunning, and cancellation.
Leaving paasboxThe escrow in your project, the open-source exit kit, the recreation path without Gardener, and the wind-down promise.
Security & trustToken custody, the single write path, what I can and cannot see, EU data location, and responsible disclosure.
Reference
Section titled “Reference”Gardener settings & exportThe allow-listed settings you can set in Gardener's own schema, the fields the platform owns, and what the exported YAML contains.
Using the APIThe declarative REST API, its OpenAPI schema and the TypeScript client.
FAQTest against production clusters, regions, cluster-admin access, the read/write token, what adopting does, what happens if paasbox shuts down.
GlossaryEvery product noun in one place: garden, seed, shoot, pooled and on-demand, adopt, grandfathered, hibernate, escrow, and the rest.