Quickstart

From signup to a live deployment in about 15 minutes. No sales calls, no architecture reviews.

This walkthrough takes you end-to-end: sign up, connect AWS, create a cluster, deploy your first app. If you already have an Ownkube account and a connected AWS account, jump to Deploy your first app.

What you'll need

An AWS account with permission to create IAM roles and CloudFormation stacks
A container image (public image, or one in a connected registry such as Amazon ECR or a GitHub repository)
About 15 minutes. Cluster provisioning runs in the background.

You don't need a credit card to get started. The free tier covers up to 10 vCPU and 20 GB RAM across all your clusters.

Create your account

Go to app.ownkube.io/signup and sign up with email, GitHub, or Google.

Create your organization

Ownkube auto-creates a workspace for you. You can invite teammates later from Settings.

2. Connect your AWS account

Ownkube uses a CloudFormation stack to create a least-privilege IAM role in your AWS account. Your data stays in your VPC. The platform never sees your application traffic.

Open the AWS onboarding flow

Go to AWS onboarding. The first time you land here you'll see the three-step connect flow.

Enter your AWS account ID and region

AWS account ID, 12 digits (find it in your AWS console, top-right account menu)
Region, pick where you want clusters provisioned (17 AWS regions supported, including us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, ap-south-1)

Deploy the CloudFormation stack

Click Deploy stack. A new tab opens in the AWS console with parameters pre-filled. Tick the IAM acknowledgement and click Create stack. It takes about two minutes.

Verify the connection

Come back to the Ownkube tab and click Verify. Ownkube assumes the role, runs a short account-setup workflow, and marks the account as verified.

Tip

Stuck on this step? See Connect your AWS account for the full walkthrough and troubleshooting.

3. Create a cluster

Ownkube supports two cluster shapes. We recommend starting with the Starter shape (K3s on one AWS instance), free of any Ownkube platform fee, that provisions in about 5 minutes. You can add a Production cluster (managed EKS) later for live traffic that needs to be highly available across availability zones.

Tip

Starting out? Pick the Starter shape (K3s). It's the cheapest path onto Ownkube. One EC2 instance runs unlimited apps, workers, and databases with no Ownkube platform fee, you only pay AWS for the EC2 instance. AWS Activate or other startup credits cover that in full. See the comparison table for how this stacks up against Heroku, Render, and Railway.

A single EC2 instance running K3s. Free Ownkube platform fee. You only pay AWS for the EC2 instance. Best for dev, staging, side projects, small production workloads, and single-tenant apps. Provisions in about 5 minutes.

Start the wizard

Open your dashboard and select Deploy on EC2 from the create-cluster wizard.

Name your cluster

Enter a cluster name (e.g. side-project), pick your AWS account, and keep the default region.

Pick an instance type

Instance	vCPU	Memory	~EC2 cost	Comfortably runs
`t3.medium`	2	4 GiB	~$30 / mo	1-2 apps + 1 small db
`t3.large`	2	8 GiB	~$60 / mo	2-3 apps + 1 db
`t3.xlarge`	4	16 GiB	~$120 / mo	4-6 apps + 1-2 dbs
`t3.2xlarge`	8	32 GiB	~$240 / mo	8-12 apps + 2-3 dbs

No Ownkube platform fee on top, you pay AWS only. AWS Activate or other startup credits cover these EC2 costs in full.

Review and create

Starter clusters skip the networking and compute steps. Confirm the summary and click Create cluster.

Managed Kubernetes with autoscaling, highly available across availability zones. Use this for production workloads that need HA, node autoscaling, or multi-AZ resilience. Provisions in about 10 minutes.

Start the wizard

Open your dashboard and start the create-cluster wizard.

Choose EKS and name your cluster

Select Deploy on EKS. Enter a cluster name (e.g. prod-us-east-1), pick your AWS account and region, and keep the default Kubernetes version.

Configure networking

Accept the defaults unless you have conflicting CIDRs in your VPC. Default pods CIDR is 10.244.0.0/16, services CIDR is 10.96.0.0/12.

Size your workload capacity

Drag Workload vCPUs and Memory to your starting size. Defaults are 8 vCPU and 16 GiB. You can resize after creation; autoscaling kicks in automatically.

Review and create

Confirm the review summary and estimated monthly cost. Click Create cluster.

4. Connect a registry or GitHub repository

Your deployment needs an image source. The two shipped paths are: connect Amazon ECR (via the IAM role from onboarding) or connect a GitHub repository (via the GitHub App), which lets Ownkube build images directly from source.

Go to Settings

Open Settings.

Connect a registry or GitHub App

Click Connect GitHub App to enable builds from a GitHub repository, or wire up your Amazon ECR registry. Public images need no registry connection.

See Registries for details and the full list of supported types.

5. Deploy your first app

Start a new deployment

Go to Create deployment from your dashboard.

Pick a resource type

Web, HTTP service with a public hostname
Worker, background process, no public endpoint
Job, runs once and exits
Database, managed Postgres (see Databases)
Functions (beta), serverless event handlers triggered by HTTP or a cron schedule

Pick a target

Choose the cluster from the previous step and an environment. The defaults are Development and Production. Pick Development for this first run.

Configure your container

Registry + repository + tag, pick from your connected registries
Port, the port your app listens on (e.g. 3000)
Public, toggle on for web deployments to get a public hostname
Env vars, add any KEY=value pairs your app needs. Flip the Secret toggle for anything sensitive.

Deploy

Click Create deployment. The deployment page opens and shows live status. Image pull, startup, and health-check progression.

When the status goes healthy, click the generated hostname on the Overview tab. Your app is live.

You're running

From here, Ownkube handles the rest. You can:

Scale automatically on CPU / memory thresholds. See Autoscaling.
Add a database with one click. See Databases.
Invite teammates from Settings

Deploy guide

Deep walkthrough with every field explained.

How it works

What runs where, and the trust model.

Don't see a feature you need? Email support@ownkube.io. Ownkube is shaped by the teams using it and we ship what our users ask for.