Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tries to fill exactly this sweet spot. Cheaper compute than the other hyperscalers, while still offering similar security features (TPM, Shielded Instances, Measured Boot) and a bare-metal-first focus.

Disclaimer, just joined Oracle a few months ago. I'm using both Hetzner and OCI for my private stuff and my open-source services right now. I still personally think they've identified a clever market fit there.

  Location: EU, Austria
  Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, TypeScript, Kubernetes
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marioranftl
  Email: hn@mranftl.com

Former Head of Web at a top app agency, leading full-stack projects (React, Node.js, Go) and DevOps (KVM, Kubernetes, GCP/GKE, AWS/EKS). 37y. Led multiple software engineering teams. Now open to both engineering leadership and senior individual contributor roles.

Made the switch to self-hosted https://mailu.io (on k8s) 2 years ago when Gandi announced the deprecation of their free plan.

Happy after IP was off most blocklists, but setup was kinda rough - https://mxtoolbox.com is your friend.

Location: Austria, EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Go, TypeScript, Bash, PostgreSQL, and all things cloud-native: Kubernetes (GKE, RKE2, K3s, EKS, kind), Ansible, Argo CD, Terraform, Helm, Docker, GitHub Actions, CKA Certified.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marioranftl

Email: hn@mranftl.com

--

Former Platform Engineering Lead specializing in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Over ten years of experience building client applications and designing maintainable, scalable API services on highly available infrastructure. Experienced working with both corporations and startups! I build (bare-metal) clusters for fun. Seeking my next challenge with an international team and/or in HPC or massive cluster environments. Let’s connect!

  Location: EU, Austria
  Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Cloud-Native, Kubernetes, Go, TypeScript, CKA Certified
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marioranftl
  Email: hn@mranftl.com

DEV + SRE | 10+ yrs in Software Architecture, Cloud-Native Tech & Kubernetes | Led full lifecycle of cloud infra, including a seamless upgrade of a prod K8s cluster from v1.9 (2018) to v1.31 (2025) with minimal downtime | Seeking next challenge at global/massive cluster scale. Let’s connect!

Happy to hear that! When it comes to testing services that depend on PostgreSQL, this is still my preferred solution.

https://github.com/allaboutapps/integresql

disclaimer: author

google webfonts helper - https://gwfh.mranftl.com

According to the Cloudflare December monthly stats, I had roughly 57k unique users, 15m requests, 1,3TB traffic. Though, most requests are likely to be bots/integrators spamming the API...

Running on a bare metal k8s cluster (libvirt) on top of a single dedicated Hetzner server, ~70€/month. Not going to monetize it, but will maybe accept donations/sponsorings in the future...

Just moved off my 8 years old project google-webfonts-helper https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced the current dyno with a 301 handler: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect

AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for their *.herokuapp.com sub-domains without actually running a dyno there.

Thank you so much for google-webfonts-helper! It's been helping me a lot recently ever since there was this questionable court decision in Germany that using fonts directly from Google violates the privacy regulation and website owners were sued all over the place.

You havent by any chance been sued by some weird lawyer from a german capital whose name pops up all over google on researching this in the name of a person that does not really seem to exist?

They are fraudulently trying to trick people in paying ~170 euro without any clear statement on what is their claim. Dont fall for it.

I haven't been sued personally but some of my clients were. I told everyone to ignore it but had to update their websites nonetheless.

That's good to hear, I was thinking about whether google fonts helper would survive this. Awesome project by the way, I've used it a lot, thanks for making it!

I use your webfonts helper all the time! Cool to see the tiny redirect app I published 10 years ago used to keep my bookmark working.

Very happy user of https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec (rust), can recommend.

Yes, this is the one I reach for always. It works reliably AFAICT, runs on all platforms, is simple enough and still has the necessary features.

Very much agree. And the maintainer has been super responsive.

This looks great! I'll also check this out as someone who pivoted to rust tooling in the recent years.

No and we are happily using it within our overcommitted cluster (combination of shared and dedicated nodepools).

We are a small team of 5 infrastructure engineers and previously managed 200+ libvirt VMs running on bare-metal HA hypervisors in a GlusterFS storage pool (software agency, different customer application services). We started to migrate to GKE in 2017 and finished within a year or so.

I know many associate k8s with a yaml mess, but this is actually our most favourite part of it. We are able to describe a whole customer project in this format and it's not something we have to maintain in-house (Ansible). As long as you don't try to be smart (templating/helm, operator dependance), it works out pretty well, prefer plain manifests and extend that with you own validation scripts.

Nevertheless, if you have no 24/7 operations, stay the hell away from bare-metal - go managed.