Overview

Aether is a managed-Kubernetes platform. You create clusters to run your workloads, and Aether runs and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you — you never patch it, scale it, or pay attention to it operationally. You focus on your applications; we handle the plumbing underneath.

Who it’s for

Aether is built for small engineering teams who are already running Kubernetes and would rather not keep operating the control plane themselves. You already write Deployments, Services, and NetworkPolicy; what you get back is the API server, the datastore, upgrades, and the surrounding platform services — run for you, on nodes you don’t have to maintain.

What Aether operates for you

• The Kubernetes control plane — API server, controller manager, scheduler, and the cluster’s datastore, provisioned and kept healthy by Aether.
• Kubernetes version upgrades — you start them from the portal or API; Aether rolls the control plane and the worker pools.
• The CNI — Cilium is installed before your workloads land, ready for NetworkPolicy and CiliumNetworkPolicy.
• A private container registry for your organization, with vulnerability scanning included.
• Single sign-on for the portal — one account for your team across clusters, registry, and billing.
• DNS and TLS — every cluster gets a stable public DNS name for its Kubernetes API endpoint, and the certificates behind the portal, API, and registry are issued and renewed for you.
• Observability — a built-in cluster health view in the portal, with no separate login.
• Immutable worker nodes — workers run Talos Linux, an API-managed immutable OS with no SSH and no package manager, so nodes are replaced rather than patched in place.

You keep full kubectl-level control of everything inside the cluster: your workloads, RBAC, secrets, network policies, and persistent volumes. See the Platform model for the full split of responsibilities.

Where it runs

Aether runs in one region today: eu-fi — Helsinki, Finland, in a Hetzner data centre (see the privacy policy for the processing details). Every cluster, its worker nodes, its storage, and its load balancers live entirely within that region. More regions may follow; see Regions.

Prerequisites

Before you start you’ll need:

• An Aether account and organization. Sign up at the portal.
• A payment method on file for any paid usage (see the Billing model).
• kubectl installed locally if you want to connect to your cluster from your own machine.

Everything in these docs is available from the portal and from the REST API. An aether CLI and a Terraform provider are planned and not available yet — don’t build a workflow that assumes them.

Trying it out

Every node has a 15-minute grace period, measured from the moment it first appears in the cluster’s node list, so a cluster you create and remove within that window carries no node charge. The cluster’s €4 public API endpoint and any load balancers are not covered by it — they lock their month the first time the address is seen. Persistent volumes and registry storage are charged per hourly observation instead. See the Billing model.

The journey

A typical first session looks like this:

1. Create your first cluster — name it, pick a region and Kubernetes version, and watch it come up.
2. Node pools — add and size the worker nodes that run your workloads.
3. Connect with kubectl — download your kubeconfig and start deploying.

From there, explore the rest of the platform:

• Networking — network policies and load balancers.
• Storage — persistent volumes.
• Container registry — push and pull your images.
• Observability — watch your cluster’s health.

Support and contact

• Support requests — open one any time from the Support section of the portal. That’s the route for anything about your clusters, billing, or the platform.
• Legal and privacy questions — email legal@aetherplatform.cloud.