Inspiration
Many Kenyan small businesses want their data and websites hosted locally, but infrastructure in Kenya is expensive and limited. After working with many of these businesses, I realized the need for a cloud platform that’s affordable, developer-friendly, and truly based in Kenya — not just in branding, but in infrastructure too.
What it does
ScaleNodes is a developer-first cloud platform built with African businesses in mind. It offers scalable hosting, backend infrastructure, and container-based deployments — all while aiming to run on servers physically located in Kenya. It’s designed to be the Kenyan alternative to platforms like Vercel or Heroku, giving developers the power to build locally, deploy globally, and support the local tech ecosystem.
How we built it
ScaleNodes is built on top of lightweight Kubernetes (K3s) clusters with Rook for storage. The backend uses Go and Svelte for performance and simplicity. We've integrated support for Docker builds in multiple language For webservices such as constraints.
Challenges we ran into
Currently we are hosting our clusters on hetzner which are based on Europe , it has been a challenge to setup actual physical servers in Kenya note because of skill but actually data center companies as follow:
- Too expensive or not clear with pricing.
- Most African Data Center aim for big instution like banks, university and gorvernment so they only priotize them.
- Capital, currently its not the most important at the moment but i love to bring more people in to the project improve speed of development so to release more features and also more servers.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite the infrastructure hurdles, ScaleNodes runs Kubernetes workloads, supports multi-language Docker builds, and offers one-click app deployments for local businesses. We’ve built tools that are developer-first, yet practical enough for small businesses with limited resources.
Also we have been able to launch our first MVP in testing phase and given free credits to customers who are interested to test and give us there feedback, the link
What we learned
What i have learned is what is the meaning of scalability, at first always thought scalability is bigger servers, multiple developer teams to manage system, in theory this seems to be the case
What's next for ScaleNodes
- Improve the User Experience on the Website for Developer, why? it has became clear most customers prefer simpler experience when using our platform.
- Monitoring and Bug detection for Web Services, we plan to allow users discover error faster without have to scroll through logs, using AI we can detect bugs, record and report them to the customers early on.
- More One Click Deployment such support for n8n and also New Web Services such as django and Rust.
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