Frequently Asked Questions

What is managed private cloud?

Managed private cloud sits between public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) and renting your own bare metal. You get dedicated bare-metal servers with a fully managed Kubernetes stack and an SRE team, without hiring an infrastructure team yourself. Lithus handles the hardware, networking, Kubernetes, databases, monitoring, backups, and on-call. You deploy your application and focus on your product.

Four infrastructure models exist on a spectrum (see our infrastructure spectrum page for a full comparison):

1. Public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure): most convenient, most expensive, usage-based billing
2. Managed private cloud (Lithus): ~50% cheaper, dedicated hardware, SRE team included, €5k/month minimum
3. Rented bare metal (Hetzner/OVH direct): cheapest per unit, but you manage everything yourself
4. Owned hardware (colocation): lowest long-term cost at scale, requires capital expenditure and a full ops team

How much does Lithus cost?

Flat monthly rate starting at €5,000/month. The price includes dedicated bare-metal servers, the full Kubernetes and observability stack, and embedded SRE time. No egress fees, no per-resource metering, no managed service surcharges. Use our pricing calculator to see what your budget buys.

SRE time scales with spend: 2 engineering days per €5,000/month. So a €10,000/month cluster includes 4 days of SRE capacity. This is not ticket-queue hours; it's staff-level engineers who know your stack.

Typical savings versus equivalent AWS/GCP/Azure infrastructure: ~50%. See our side-by-side comparison for a full breakdown.

How long does migration take?

4-6 weeks from order to production-ready cluster (hardware procurement, burn-in, Kubernetes bootstrap, full stack deployment). Then phased workload migration at your pace, typically 1-3 months total depending on complexity.

Your existing infrastructure stays live during migration. No setup fee. Billing starts when your workloads are running on our infrastructure, not when provisioning begins. For larger clusters, we may invoice the first few months in advance to cover hardware procurement. For a real-world example, see how we migrated PrepBusiness with a 45-day turnaround.

What's included in Lithus SRE support?

• 2 SRE days per €5,000/month of spend (built into the price, not a separate consulting fee)
• 2-hour incident response SLA for infrastructure issues
• 24/7 on-call: we carry the pager for the full stack
• Direct Slack Connect channel for day-to-day communication
• Monthly infrastructure review calls
• Kubernetes and software upgrades
• Database failover and backup verification
• No ticket portals, no chatbots

To see what this looks like in practice, read how we diagnosed and eliminated mysterious downtime for PrepBusiness or built custom tooling for The Climate Risk Group.

Where is Lithus infrastructure hosted?

Infrastructure is hosted primarily on Hetzner dedicated servers in German data centres. EU data sovereignty by default: no US hyperscaler, no CLOUD Act ambiguity. All data processed and stored on hardware Lithus controls.

Hetzner provides predictable hardware costs and a positive reputation among technical audiences. Lithus adds the managed Kubernetes stack, SRE team, and operational responsibility on top. For clients requiring specific regions or configurations, we also work with other providers. More on our About page.

What Kubernetes distribution does Lithus use?

RKE2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2), deployed on dedicated bare-metal servers connected by a dedicated fibre network with sub-millisecond inter-node latency. The full stack includes:

• Networking: Cilium CNI with eBPF dataplane, cert-manager
• Storage: OpenEBS Mayastor, ZFS LocalPV, MinIO/Garage/Ceph for S3-compatible object storage
• Databases: PostgreSQL (StackGres), MySQL, Valkey/Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, MongoDB
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Alertmanager
• Security: Keycloak, CrowdSec, WireGuard, Headscale/Tailscale
• CI/CD: Harbor, Forgejo/GitLab, GitHub/Forgejo/GitLab Actions, Firecracker microVMs
• Backup: Velero, Restic, PostgreSQL WAL streaming with point-in-time recovery

Open-source throughout. If you leave, you take the whole setup with you. See our Services & Stack page for the full breakdown of each layer.

What happens if something breaks at 2am?

Our on-call engineer gets paged and fixes it. 2-hour incident response SLA. We carry the pager for Kubernetes, databases, networking, storage, and monitoring. You own your application; we own the platform. See our full stack breakdown for exactly what we cover.

Is there vendor lock-in?

No. The entire stack is open-source and runs on standard Kubernetes APIs. Your Helm charts, Terraform modules, and CI/CD pipelines work here the same as on any other Kubernetes provider. No proprietary services, no vendor SDK, no exit penalty. If you leave, you take your workloads with you. See the full stack — it's standard tooling throughout.

Why not just rent Hetzner servers directly?

You can — and if you have an infrastructure team to manage them, it's a good option. Hetzner gives you cheap dedicated hardware. What it doesn't give you is a production Kubernetes stack, managed databases, observability, backups, security hardening, or anyone to page at 2am when something breaks.

Lithus runs on Hetzner hardware. The value isn't the servers — it's everything on top: RKE2, Cilium, StackGres, Prometheus/Grafana/Loki, Velero backups, and an SRE team that knows your stack. If you have the team to build and maintain all of that yourself, renting direct is cheaper. If you don't, you're comparing Lithus not against Hetzner's price but against Hetzner's price plus 1-2 full-time infrastructure engineers (€80k-€150k/year each).

See our infrastructure spectrum for where managed private cloud sits relative to renting bare metal directly.

Do I need to hire DevOps engineers?

No. SRE/DevOps capacity is included in the price. 2 engineering days per €5,000/month. These are staff-level infrastructure engineers available via Slack who know your stack, not generic support agents working from a runbook. For most clients in the €5k-25k/month range, this replaces the need for a dedicated infrastructure hire entirely. Schedule a call to discuss your specific needs.