Syself Autopilot is a platform for fully managed Kubernetes that runs on your own Hetzner servers. You describe a cluster as a single Kubernetes object and apply it - Syself Autopilot builds the cluster, keeps it healthy, and upgrades it. Your workloads run on standard, upstream Kubernetes, on machines in your own Hetzner account.

Open image: Illustration of Syself foxes at a control console operating Syself Autopilot, which manages Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner

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Illustration of Syself foxes at a control console operating Syself Autopilot, which manages Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner

We have run Kubernetes on Hetzner in production since 2020. We built and maintain cluster-api-provider-hetzner⁠, the most-starred Cluster API provider on GitHub, and contribute upstream to the Kubernetes projects it runs on. In 2023 we won the public tender for the Kubernetes-as-a-Service part of the Sovereign Cloud Stack, an initiative of the German government, and built the Cluster Stack approach there. Since then we have managed thousands of nodes for agencies, enterprises, and startups.

How you work with Syself Autopilot

Everything is declarative. You define and create your clusters through a central Kubernetes API, the management cluster (learn more about accessing the management cluster ). You apply a manifest, and Syself Autopilot reconciles your infrastructure to match it.

Syself Autopilot builds on Cluster API⁠ and adds a layer of automation on top. Cluster API is the widely adopted, proven standard for managing Kubernetes clusters as Kubernetes objects and uses the same declarative language you know from managing your apps in Kubernetes.

Two ideas shape how Syself Autopilot runs your clusters:

• Nodes are disposable. A node is never patched in place. When it needs to change, for an upgrade, a fault, or a security fix, a fresh node replaces it. Every node runs Syself Linux, an immutable operating system, built from source and verified at boot.
• A Cluster Stack is tested and released as a whole. The node operating system, the cluster topology, and all components inside the cluster ship together under a single version number, built and tested as one unit.

To go deeper on the model, including how the management and workload clusters divide the work, how self-healing and upgrades run, and what makes the node OS verifiable, read the Concepts tab.

Structure of this documentation

If you just want to try it out, follow the Getting Started guide . By the end you will have a highly available, production-ready cluster running on Syself Autopilot.

The tabs at the top of the navigation split the docs by topic:

• The Concepts tab explains how the platform works and gives background knowledge.
• The task tabs (Cluster management, Servers and nodes, Networking, Storage, Observability, Workloads, and Security) each own one area of running clusters in production.
• Accounts and Organization covers user management and authorization, as well as billing-related topics.
• If something goes wrong, many tabs have Troubleshooting guides and the Support tab explains how to reach us.

Using the docs

The version picker in the header selects the Cluster Stack release the docs describe. The content changes with it, so pick the one that matches what you are doing:

• Creating a cluster: select the latest version, unless you specifically want a different one.
• Upgrading an existing cluster: select the current version of the cluster you are upgrading, so the upgrade guides show the right steps.

For anything else, such as troubleshooting or the task guides, use the version your clusters are on, or the latest version if you do not have a cluster yet.