Starting point
Production-ready SaaS infrastructure is more than a running server. It needs a described target state, a governed path for changes, and continuous observation of operations. If any of these parts is missing, infrastructure becomes hard to reproduce and hard to reconstruct in the event of failure. deplate addresses exactly this gap between a single server and a viable operating foundation.
Added to that are the high costs of large cloud providers and lock-in to a single vendor. Teams that want production-ready environments without this lock-in need a foundation that makes location, cost, and control explicit instead of hiding them behind a platform.
The decision
I develop deplate as an Infrastructure-as-Code product on Hetzner. Kubernetes handles orchestration, GitOps the workflow for the desired system state, CI/CD delivery, and monitoring ongoing observation. These four building blocks form the product architecture I am responsible for.
The entire infrastructure is described for a GDPR-compliant EU region. Provider, operating region, and operating mechanisms are therefore not after-the-fact decisions, but part of the same versioned product definition. Anyone who reads the definition also sees where and with which mechanisms the infrastructure is operated.
The build
Infrastructure as Code describes the environment in versionable definitions instead of manual steps. For deplate, these definitions set up the Hetzner and Kubernetes base and make every state repeatable. The same setup can therefore be used reproducibly as the foundation of a SaaS environment.
GitOps reconciles the target state described in files with the cluster, CI/CD checks and delivers changes, monitoring reports the running state back. Together, definition, delivery, and observation form a closed technical path from description to the running environment.
Because the target state lives fully in files, an environment can not only be set up once, but restored equally at any time, extended, or rebuilt in a second region. Infrastructure thus moves from a one-off manual build to a reviewable, repeatable artefact whose history remains traceable in the version history.
In operation
In operations, deplate provides production-ready environments in minutes — for Laravel, Next.js, FastAPI, and Astro. The clusters sit in a GDPR-compliant EU region; provider and operating location are fixed product parameters rather than arbitrary configuration.
Every change stays tied to the same mechanisms: Kubernetes runs the workloads, GitOps holds the target state, CI/CD transports changes, and monitoring makes the state visible. The path from versioned definition to observable environment thus remains fully inside the running deplate architecture.
Fakten & Umfang
- Provider
- Hetzner
- Orchestration
- Kubernetes · GitOps
- Operations
- CI/CD · Monitoring
- Region
- GDPR-compliant EU region
- Typ
- Infrastructure
- Zeitraum
- 2025+ · LIVE
- Kubernetes
- GitOps
- CI/CD
- Monitoring