Managed Pods is for teams that want their applications in containers without doing the operations themselves, from €350 per month. Prefer to deploy and manage things yourself at a lower price? Then self-service Pods from €100 is the better fit. Does your application run better on a dedicated VM? Have a look at CaffeineStacks from €300.
What is Managed Pods?
The same Kubernetes platform as Pods, with one difference: we take over the operations. We watch the health of your applications, patch the platform and the managed databases, keep backups and recovery in order, and step in when something breaks. You keep the code and the releases, we keep the environment healthy. Java is our specialty, but we manage Python, Node.js, PHP and Go workloads with the same care.
We manage the platform, not the code
The boundary is simple: if it lives in your repository, it's yours. That includes the contents of your container images (base image, JVM, dependencies): those come from your build. If it runs underneath, it's ours. Included:
- Platform and node operating system, including the container runtime
- Load balancer, ingress and TLS
- Database engine
- Deployment mechanism
- Backups and recovery
- Patches and upgrades for this entire layer
- Incident analysis and recovery in this layer
When something breaks, we don't stop at that boundary. We keep analysing until the cause is pinpointed, even when it sits in the application. You get a substantiated report, for example with a heap dump or query plan, not a referral.
Not included: application code and functional bugs, the contents of your container images (base image updates and JVM versions go into your own build), releases and migrations unless agreed, and extensive profiling, load testing or code review. Work outside scope gets a fixed price per job up front, based on our €120 hourly rate. Want help keeping your base images clean and current? Happy to do that as a fixed-price job.
Backups and recovery
Backups run twice a day, encrypted, automatically verified for readability and stored remotely. The tail of the retention goes to tape.
For managed databases, continuous WAL archiving is standard: restore to a point in time, not to a backup timestamp.
Pricing
Two flavours, nothing in between.
One workload, fully looked after: €350 per month all-in. Management, your own namespace and a Cortado pod (4 GB, 2 vCPU, 75 GB) included. Does your workload need more? You pay the difference to the heavier blend (Espresso +€50, Lungo +€150).
Multiple applications? The bundle: €750 per month for the management of up to 5 workloads, plus the pod capacity your workloads need (below). Growing beyond that? Each additional bundle of up to 5 workloads costs €500 per month.
Both options include Advanced response times as standard: for P1 incidents on production we also respond outside office hours. The full definitions and times per priority are in the Basis/Advanced table. The one-workload price applies per customer for exactly one workload; from your second workload onwards, the bundle applies.
Pod capacity for the bundle is priced per workload, at the published self-service prices:
| Blend | Resources | Price/month |
|---|---|---|
| Cortado | 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, 75 GB | €100 |
| Espresso | 8 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, 100 GB | €150 |
| Lungo | 16 GB RAM, 6 vCPU, 150 GB | €250 |
Every pod gets its blend's storage allocated, including redundancy and backups. Need more? NVMe expansion costs €25 per 100 GB.
Worked examples: one Java application with its own PostgreSQL database is one workload: €350 per month, done. Two applications, each with their own database, are two workloads: with two Espresso pods that comes to €750 + 2 x €150 = €1,050 per month. Bringing an existing application with you? Add the one-time takeover setup (from €950).
Bringing an existing application from another platform or a departing maintainer? We handle the takeover: discovery, handover, a runbook, a verified restore and monitoring onboarding, and where needed we help get your container build and base image on solid ground. The takeover setup is a one-time charge of your environment's full monthly amount, with a minimum of €950. Your developers check that everything is right and, more importantly, just keep shipping. A greenfield standard deploy (an application that doesn't run anywhere yet) has no setup fee.
And when you leave: a one-time export of your data and customer-specific configuration is included, within 30 days of cancellation.
What counts as a workload?
A managed workload is a separately deployable application component with its own release cycle, its own configuration and its own operational responsibility. Platform components such as ingress or monitoring don't count. An application with its own database counts as one workload: a dedicated database per application is the normal pattern on our platform. A database serving multiple applications counts as its own workload. We define what a workload is together at intake. If you grow past the bundle limit, we plan a review with a start date.
Growing into your own cluster
Running more than 10 workloads? Then your own cluster is the right next step. Look at our Managed Clusters from €2,500/month: the same operations, but on dedicated infrastructure that grows with you.
