Your services, your hardware, your rules.
Buddy Cluster turns ordinary machines into a Kubernetes cluster you set up and run entirely from a web panel. No terminal, no systems administrator, and nothing rented by the month.
The wall small organisations hit
Running your own software reliably means clustering, encrypted networking, certificates and updates that never stop arriving. The tools that do those things well are built for people who do this professionally, and they assume you are one of them.
Buddy Cluster puts those tools behind guided flows. You answer questions in a browser and it does the work on the machines. Nothing is concealed: each flow states what it is about to change before it changes it, and what you end up with is ordinary Kubernetes underneath. If you outgrow the panel, you have not been locked into an appliance.
How it works
Set up the first machine
Buddy Cluster installs k3s, brings up an encrypted overlay network and hands you the panel. This machine is the only one that appears on your local network — everything else stays behind it.
Add the rest
Further machines join over an encrypted WireGuard network and stay off your LAN entirely. Adding one, or removing it again, is a guided flow rather than a runbook.
Install what you need
Software arrives as declarative packages from catalogues you choose. Publishing a service to the public internet — dynamic DNS, inbound routing and a valid TLS certificate — is configured when you deploy it, not bolted on afterwards.
Everything happens in one panel
Setup, nodes, storage, packages and cluster health are all in the same place, and the panel opens on status rather than on a menu — you see whether anything needs you before you see anything else.
Measured, not claimed
The project publishes its own figures. On ARM64 the Buddy stack itself idles at58 MB, which is roughly the point of the exercise.
The k3s control plane underneath it does not. A configured first machine idles at about1076 MB with no workloads on it at all, which is why the documented minimum moved from 1 GB to 2 GB. That number moved against the project’s own target, and it is in the documentation anyway.
Where it is today
Version v0.0.14, developed in the open.
Setting it up
- Turn the first machine into a working cluster from a browser. It installs and configures the cluster software for you (k3s).
- Add or remove machines whenever you need to. Each one joins over an encrypted private network and never appears on your office network (WireGuard).
- Install software from catalogues you choose — including applications built from several parts — and upgrade it in place.
Keeping it healthy
- Publish a service on the internet under your own domain name, with a valid HTTPS certificate arranged when you deploy it, not afterwards.
- Keep machines patched: operating system, firmware and kernel updates, with reboots and shutdowns handled for you.
- Update the whole cluster in one pass, taking a restore point first so you can go back (k3s upgrades, etcd snapshot).
- Catch trouble early. The panel watches the private network and cluster membership, and walks you through the repair.
Not yet
- Raspberry Pi is the only supported hardware so far. It is the first platform, not the last.
- The first machine needs 2 GB of memory — see the measurement above for why.
- There is no public build yet. That is what the dev preview will be.
We will write to you once
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