October 15, 2024
Syself automates of the entire lifecycle of clusters, freeing up your teams to work on what really matters.
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CAPH is not just another infrastructure tool—it’s a software-defined approach to Kubernetes operations, With CAPH, teams can automate their entire Kubernetes lifecycle while maintaining flexibility, scalability, and security. This is the core engine behind Syself Autopilot for Hetzner.
Managing Kubernetes infrastructure has long been a challenge, with tools like Terraform and Ansible requiring teams to define, provision, and maintain every component manually. These tools offer automation but lack continuous reconciliation, meaning infrastructure drift and manual interventions are common.
CAPH takes a software-defined approach by integrating directly into Kubernetes via Cluster API (CAPI). Instead of executing scripts to provision infrastructure and then relying on periodic updates, CAPH enables declarative cluster management where desired states are continuously enforced.
While CAPH simplifies provisioning and management, it remains agnostic about the underlying stack. Unlike fully managed Kubernetes solutions, CAPH does not dictate:
This means teams using CAPH must still define, deploy, and maintain all essential cluster components, including the Cloud Controller Manager, CNI, and security policies. To ensure production readiness, organizations must build their own testing, release, and compatibility validation pipelines.
CAPH has been extensively tested in real-world, small and large-scale Kubernetes environments on Hetzner infrastructure. While it provides a solid foundation for cluster lifecycle automation, running CAPH in production still requires organizations to define, deploy, and maintain all cluster components.
This is where Syself Autopilot for Hetzner comes in. Built on top of CAPH, Syself Autopilot extends its capabilities by providing fully managed, production-ready Kubernetes clusters. It ensures that all necessary components—from OS and Kubernetes configuration to security hardening, networking, and cloud integrations—are properly managed, maintained, and tested.
With Syself Autopilot, businesses can leverage the flexibility of CAPH while benefiting from:
By building on CAPH’s strengths, Syself Autopilot delivers a turnkey Kubernetes solution on Hetzner, removing operational burdens and allowing teams to focus on their applications rather than infrastructure management.
As an open-source initiative, CAPH is developed and maintained through a collaborative effort involving Syself, enterprises, and independent contributors. It is designed to be vendor-neutral and flexible, allowing organizations to integrate it into their own Kubernetes environments with full control.
Cluster API (CAPI) is an open-source Kubernetes project that provides a declarative way to manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters. By defining infrastructure as Kubernetes-style resources, CAPI enables standardized cluster creation, scaling, and upgrades across multiple cloud and on-prem environments, reducing operational complexity and ensuring consistency.
CAPH extends Cluster API to support Kubernetes clusters on Hetzner infrastructure, integrating seamlessly with both bare-metal and cloud environments. It enables teams to automate cluster provisioning, scaling, and upgrades while maintaining full control over configurations. CAPH follows Kubernetes-native principles, ensuring compatibility with GitOps workflows and declarative infrastructure management.
Syself specializes in Kubernetes automation and lifecycle management, offering solutions that simplify infrastructure operations through declarative, scalable, and production-ready architectures.
With a strong emphasis on testability, security, and efficiency, Syself enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters with minimal overhead. As an active contributor to Kubernetes, Cluster API and CAPH, Syself supports the broader Kubernetes community in making cloud-native infrastructure more accessible and reliable.
Hetzner is a leading European hosting provider known for its high-performance and cost-efficient infrastructure. With data centers in Germany, Finland, the United States, and Singapore, Hetzner offers bare-metal dedicated servers and cloud instances, delivering scalable and reliable hosting solutions. Hetzner’s ISO 27001-certified data centers ensure high security and compliance standards for running mission-critical workloads, including Kubernetes environments.
CAPH v1.0 is now available, enabling teams to leverage Kubernetes-native automation for their infrastructure.
Syself automates of the entire lifecycle of clusters, freeing up your teams to work on what really matters.