Your services, your hardware, your rules.

Running your own software reliably means clustering, encrypted networking, certificates and updates that never stop arriving. The tools that do those things well are built for people who do this professionally, and they assume you are one of them.

Buddy Cluster puts those tools behind guided flows. You answer questions in a browser and it does the work on the machines. Nothing is concealed: each flow states what it is about to change before it changes it, and what you end up with is ordinary Kubernetes underneath. If you outgrow the panel, you have not been locked into an appliance.

The panel opens on status rather than on a menu: if anything needs you, you see it before you see anything else. It watches the private network and cluster membership, keeps machines patched — operating system, firmware and kernel, with reboots handled — and updates the whole cluster in one pass, taking a restore point first so you can go back.

It also updates itself. The panel checks a signed document once a day to learn whether a newer version of Buddy exists, and can install it for you. That check is off until you switch it on, it sends nothing about your cluster, and if the install fails the machine puts back the version it was running and tells you why.

Publishing a service to the internet is the part a small business usually cannot do at all. An ordinary broadband line has no fixed address, and many sit behind carrier-grade NAT, where forwarding a port on the router is not an option in the first place. Buddy Cluster works either way: it detects how traffic can reach you, and where it has to, runs a small connector that dials out instead. No router changes, no fixed address. You get your own domain name and a valid certificate, arranged when you publish rather than afterwards.

Getting into the panel is your username and a six-digit code from an authenticator app. After enrolment there is no password left to leak.