Mattias Åsell

Ankra's own platform now runs in Helsinki. The timeline, the bill, the benchmark numbers, and the places UpCloud let us down, from the team that did the move.

We ran the same k6, iperf3 and fio suite on EKS, GKE and Hetzner and lined the results up against UpCloud, OVH and DigitalOcean. The cheapest node in the test won more than it had any right to.

Two identical cloud VMs measured 2.8x apart on CPU; one failed etcd's fsync bar. A 15-minute in-cluster benchmark suite catches this before production does.

We ran the same k6, iperf3 and fio suite on identical Kubernetes clusters on UpCloud, OVH and DigitalOcean. The spec sheets matched; the numbers did not.

ingress-nginx is retired and its successor was cancelled before it shipped. A migration path to Gateway API that does not require a big-bang weekend.

Half of all clusters are running an ingress controller that stopped receiving security patches in March. Meanwhile, teams debate service meshes. The five findings that show up in every real cluster security review, each with the incident that proves it and the fix.

Every GitOps rollout stalls on one question: where do the secrets go? A practical guide to SOPS and AGE encryption in Ankra, so credentials live in Git safely and AI-generated config never leaks a key.

New Ankra clusters no longer run ArgoCD. Here is the engineering story of the native deployment engine: why we built it, how the reconcile loop works, what the migration does to your live resources (nothing), and what we have not finished yet.

'Don't use Kubernetes until you have a platform team' was good advice in 2019. The premises changed. What a two-to-six person company should set up in week one, what to deliberately skip, and what it actually costs: about zero.

AI agents have wiped real production databases this year. Replit's went down during a code freeze, Cursor's took nine seconds via Terraform. Here's how Ankra's draft-first, GitOps-backed AI gives teams a senior DevOps agent without that failure mode.

Master the essential strategies and patterns for running reliable, scalable applications on Kubernetes in production. Learn from real-world examples and avoid common pitfalls.