We removed the DIY from
fleet operations
PodWarden turns your servers — bare metal, VMs, or LXC containers — into a managed fleet. Pick a template, choose a server, deploy. Kubernetes runs under the hood, but you never have to touch it.
Most teams don't need to become a Kubernetes company. They just need the outcomes.
The cost of doing it yourself
Without PodWarden
- Hire senior DevOps to build fleet tooling from scratch
- Months of trial-and-error with K3s on mixed hardware
- Fragile upgrades — every deploy is a risk event
- Knowledge trapped in one engineer's head
- Scaling means SSH into each box and figure it out
With PodWarden
- Fleet management is a product, not a project
- GPU placement works out of the box
- Deployments are tracked, versioned, and rollback-safe
- Repeatable operations, not hero engineering
- Add a server, pick a template, deploy — done
Kubernetes consumption, not Kubernetes research
Setting up K3s correctly across bare metal, VMs, and mixed hardware with GPUs is not a weekend project — it's an ongoing competency. PodWarden packages that competency so you don't have to.
Fleet-first, not box-first
Designed to behave like a system, not a collection of individual servers. Automatic discovery, smart placement, and fleet-wide operations from day one.
Upgrades as routine, not risk
Every deployment is tracked with full history. Roll back to any previous version in one click. Updates become a business operation, not an outage window.
Reliability as default
Multi-cluster management, resource tracking, and built-in secrets storage are included — not bolted on as a custom project after the first outage.
Buy fleet operations, don't build them
A senior DevOps engineer costs $150k+/year. A Kubernetes platform project takes months before it's production-ready. PodWarden gives you the same outcomes — and for most users, it's free.
- Unlimited servers & clusters
- All templates & deployments
- GPU placement & secrets
- Full deployment history
Individuals, homelabs, small teams
- Everything in Free
- Cloud catalog & fleet API
- AI-assisted configuration
- Priority support
Teams who need cloud features
- Everything in Pro
- Private template catalogs
- SSO & audit logs
- Dedicated support & SLA
Compliance, private catalogs, SLA
From “build a platform” to “use a product”
From project uncertainty to product certainty
From hero engineers to repeatable operations
If you don't pay for reliability upfront, you pay for it later in downtime, emergency engineering, and lost projects.
Real teams, real infrastructure
The common thread: teams that self-host critical software and need it managed professionally — without hiring a platform team.
“We wanted to be custodians of our own patient data. We run Outline for docs, Keycloak for SSO, and Mattermost for internal chat — all on two servers in our office. Our previous IT person set it up with docker-compose and then left. Nobody knew how to upgrade anything safely. With PodWarden, every service is a tracked template. Our new contractor picked it up in a day.”
“We were paying $3,200/month for Atlassian, Salesforce, and Slack seats. Switched to GitLab, SuiteCRM, and Mattermost — $0 in licensing. What we didn't budget for was the DevOps. Two months in: five servers, twelve containers, zero documentation on how any of it was set up. PodWarden turned that mess into a managed fleet in an afternoon.”
“We build a marketing automation platform. When we needed to go from 3 servers to 15 for a product launch, our single DevOps engineer became the bottleneck. With PodWarden, our developers deploy to staging themselves — pick a template, choose a cluster, done. We added 12 servers in a week without hiring another DevOps person.”
“We generate AI videos for social media campaigns. Each render job needs a GPU for 2–4 hours. Before PodWarden, we'd SSH into each machine, pull the image, set env vars, pray it works. Now we have a template for our inference worker — spin up GPU nodes when a campaign drops, tear them down when it's done. GPU costs dropped 40% because we stopped leaving idle workers running.”
“I run 30+ containers across three mini PCs at home. Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden, Grafana — you name it. I used to manage everything with Portainer and scattered docker-compose files. After a drive failure, I realized I had no idea how to rebuild half of it. PodWarden tracks every deployment, every config. My whole setup is reproducible now.”
Deploy anything, anywhere
Every template is a Docker container. GPU inference, media pipelines, dev tools, self-hosted apps — if it runs in Docker, PodWarden can deploy and manage it across your fleet.
LLM Inference
Ollama, vLLM, TGI
Image Generation
Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI
Video Transcoding
FFmpeg, distributed encoding
Live Streaming
Wowza, OvenMediaEngine, SRS
Media Servers
Jellyfin, Plex, Emby
Render Farms
Blender, video rendering
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis
Object Storage
MinIO, SeaweedFS
CI/CD & DevOps
GitLab, runners, registries
Monitoring
Grafana, Prometheus, Loki
Auth & Security
Keycloak, Vaultwarden, VPN
Collaboration
Matrix, Mattermost, n8n
Home Automation
Home Assistant, Node-RED
Self-Hosted Apps
Nextcloud, Bookstack, Wiki
Web & APIs
Next.js, FastAPI, any container
How it works
Add your servers
Discover machines automatically via Tailscale, or add them by hostname or IP. Bare metal, VMs, LXC — anything that runs Linux.
Pick a template
Each template is a Docker container with its requirements pre-configured — how much GPU memory, CPU, disk, which ports, what environment variables.
Deploy & scale
PodWarden finds the right server, deploys the container, and tracks the history. Add servers when demand grows, remove when the project ends.
Monitor & maintain
View logs, check endpoint health, track resource usage across your fleet. Roll back any deployment, update templates, manage secrets — all from one dashboard.
Platform features
Not simpler. More operationally complete.
Smart Placement
Each template knows what it needs — GPU memory, CPU cores, disk space. PodWarden finds the right server in your fleet and deploys there automatically.
Multi-Cluster
Manage deployments across multiple groups of servers, environments, and locations from a single dashboard.
Host Discovery
Add servers via Tailscale auto-discovery, hostname, or IP address. Provision with Ansible or connect existing machines.
Built-in Secrets
Store API keys, registry credentials, and environment secrets in PodWarden's encrypted vault. No external secret manager needed.
Logs & Monitoring
Endpoint health checks, container logs, and fleet-wide status — first-class, not afterthoughts bolted on later.
Controlled Deployments
Full deployment history with one-click rollbacks. Every change is tracked, versioned, and reversible.
Team Access
Sign in with Google, GitHub, or any identity provider. Role-based access control so operations aren't a one-person show.
Just Docker
Templates are Docker containers. If it runs in Docker, PodWarden can deploy it. No need to learn Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, or kubectl.
Any Infrastructure
Bare metal, VMs, LXC containers, cloud instances. Mix and match hardware — PodWarden manages the fleet regardless of what's underneath.
PodWarden Cloud
Extend your PodWarden instances with a centralized cloud service. Browse curated templates, manage your fleet remotely, get AI-assisted configuration, and aggregate logs across clusters.
Curated templates ready to deploy
Connect instances via API key
Smart placement suggestions