System — enterprise stack.
For each requirement below, pick the option that fits your build — recommended first, then free and cheaper alternatives — or skip what your project doesn't need. Tap the info icon next to any requirement to see why it matters.
Bare Metal Test Lab / Hardware Lab
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: $0 homelab (power cost only) / Hetzner: €45/mo AX41 64GB, €0.00/mo traffic 20TB included, €1.20/TB over / Equinix: $0.50/hr c3.small ~$360/mo, $0.05/GB egress / Vultr Bare Metal: $120/mo 32GB
Virtualization Hypervisor Layer
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: QEMU/KVM $0 OSS / Proxmox: Community $0, Standard €110/yr/socket support, $0 overage / VMware: vSphere Essentials $45/CPU/mo subscription ~$3500/yr 3-host, Std $95/CPU/mo / Overage: support tickets $300/incident
Kernel Build Farm
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Jenkins $0 self-hosted / GitHub Actions: Free 2000 mins/mo hosted, self-hosted runners $0, Team $4/user/mo, Enterprise $21/user/mo 50k mins / BuildKite: Free 1 agent, Team $15/user/mo + $15/agent/mo unlimited mins / Cirrus Bare Metal $500/mo per server
CI/CD for Kernel (Self-Hosted Bare Metal Runners)
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: self-hosted runners $0 unlimited / GitHub: Free 2000 mins, Team $4/user/mo 3000 mins, Enterprise $21/user/mo 50k mins, Overage $0.08/min Linux / Woodpecker $0 OSS / BuildKite agents $15/agent/mo
Source Control Hosting (Kernel Monorepo)
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: GitHub Free unlimited private repos, 500MB packages, 1GB LFS / Gitea $0 / CE $0 / Paid: GitHub Enterprise $21/user/mo includes 50GB LFS, $0.25/GB-mo overage / Perforce: Free 5 users, Enterprise $40/user/mo
Binary Artifact & OS Image Storage
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: MinIO $0 self-hosted / B2 Free 10GB storage, $0.006/GB after, $0.01/GB download, free 1GB/day / R2 Free 10GB, $0.015/GB after egress $0 / S3: Free 12mo 5GB, then $0.023/GB/mo std, $0.09/GB egress, $0.005/1000 PUT / JFrog Free 2GB storage 10GB transfer, Pro $37/mo 5TB transfer
Symbol Server (Debug Symbols)
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Breakpad $0, GCS 5GB free, S3 5GB free 12mo / Self-hosted Symbolicator $0 / Sentry Cloud: Free 5k symbol queries/mo, Team $26/mo 50k queries, $0.00032/query overage / JFrog $37/mo
Crash Dump Analysis Pipeline
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Crashpad $0, WinDbg $0 / Sentry self-hosted $0 / Sentry Cloud: Free 5k errors/mo, Team $26/mo 50k errors, Business $80/mo 100k, $0.00029/error over / Backtrace: from $200/mo 100k dumps, $0.002/dump over
OS Image Registry & Distribution
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: GHCR Free 500MB storage 1GB transfer/mo, Harbor $0 / ECR Free 500MB/mo, then $0.10/GB/mo storage $0.09/GB transfer / Quay Free 1 private, Cloud $25/mo 5 repos / Fastly: Free $0 trial 1TB, $0.12/GB over
Distributed Build Cache (ccache/sccache)
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: ccache/sccache $0 / BuildKite Cache Free 10GB, Pro unlimited $15/user/mo / S3 cache $0.023/GB/mo / Incredibuild: from $40/user/mo unlimited cache, $15 for build acceleration / Gradle Enterprise Cache Cloud $437.50/mo for 25 users, $15/user over
Static Analysis for C/C++ Kernel Code
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Clang SA $0, cppcheck $0, CodeQL Free 2000 Action mins + unlimited public repos / SonarQube Community $0 / Coverity Scan Free OSS only, Commercial Contact sales avg $30k/yr for 50M LOC / SonarQube Cloud: $32/mo per 100k LOC, $150/yr server base / CodeQL Enterprise included in GitHub Enterprise $21/user/mo
Fuzz Testing Infra (syzkaller/AFL++)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: AFL++/syzkaller/libFuzzer $0 / OSS-Fuzz Free for OSS projects unlimited compute / Self-hosted compute cost: $0.05/vCPU/hr ~$200/mo for 10 parallel fuzzers (Hetzner) / Code Intelligence: from $1500/mo 50 fuzz targets, $0.10/CPU-hr over / FuzzingLabs $2000/mo
Driver Signing Service (WHQL / Apple KEXT)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: self-signed $0, Apple ad-hoc $0 / Apple Developer $99/yr unlimited notarizations $0 per notarization / DigiCert EV Code Signing $699/yr includes HSM token / Microsoft HW Dev Center $0 submission fee, requires EV cert $699/yr / SSL.com eSigner $680/yr unlimited signs
Secure Boot Signing + HSM
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: SoftHSM2 $0 / YubiHSM2 $650 one-time, 0/mo / YubiKey $50 one-time / AWS CloudHSM Free trial 30 days, then $1.45/hr per HSM ~$1040/mo, no per-op fee / Thales Luna A750 $20k one-time + $3k/yr support / Azure Dedicated HSM $2.60/hr ~$1872/mo
Code Review System (Kernel Patch Workflow)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Gerrit $0 self-hosted, GitHub PRs unlimited free, Patchwork $0 / Graphite Free 100 reviews/mo, Starter $10/user/mo unlimited / GitHub Enterprise $21/user/mo / GerritForge support $15k/yr
Kernel Telemetry & Panic Reporting
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: OTel $0, ClickHouse self-hosted $0 / Grafana Cloud Free 50GB logs 10k metrics + 50GB traces, Pro $29/mo 100GB logs 15k metrics, $0.50/GB log over / Sentry Free 5k events/mo, Team $26/mo 50k, $0.00026/event over / Datadog APM $31/host/mo, $1.27/1k traces ingested
Log Aggregation for Kernel Logs
Tells you when things break and why. You cannot fix what you cannot see — this is how you keep downtime short.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Loki/ELK/OpenSearch self-hosted $0 / Grafana Cloud Logs Free 50GB/mo, Pro $29/mo 100GB $0.50/GB over / Datadog Logs $0.10/GB ingest, $1.70/million indexed, retention $0.10/GB/mo 30d / Elastic Cloud $95/mo 8GB RAM, $0.11/GB logs / Splunk Cloud $109/mo 1GB/day ingest
Kernel Performance Benchmark Lab
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Phoronix/LKP/pmbench $0 / Hetzner AX51 €65/mo benchmark node / InfluxDB Cloud Free 30GB storage, $0.002/1k writes + $0.002/GB-hr query, Standard $99/mo 300GB / Grafana Enterprise $0 self-hosted or Cloud $29/mo Pro
Debugger & Remote JTAG/KGDB Infra
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: OpenOCD/GDB/KGDB $0 / J-Link EDU $99 one-time, J-Link BASE $698 one-time, J-Link Pro $1488 one-time / TRACE32 PowerDebug $10k-50k one-time + $2k/yr support / IAR I-Jet $1000 one-time
Secrets Management for Signing Keys
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Vault OSS $0, SOPS $0 / Infisical Free 100 secrets, Pro $25/mo per project unlimited secrets / HCP Vault Free 25 secrets 100 TPS, Standard $0.03/hr ~$22/mo per cluster + $2/key/mo HSM / AWS KMS $1/key/mo + $0.03/10k requests, $0.50/hr CloudHSM if used / Doppler Free 100 secrets, Team $10/user/mo
Hardware Interconnect Test Rig (PCIe/USB/NVMe)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: DIY $0 + kernel usbtest $0 / Loopback cards: PCIe Gen4 $150 one-time, USB 3 $50 / Total Phase Beagle USB $1200 one-time / LeCroy Summit M5x PCIe $35k one-time, daily rental $500/day, TMA4 $50k / Ellisys USB Explorer 350 $25k one-time
Compliance & SBOM Generation
Keeps you secure and compliant with regulations. Required for enterprise customers and handling sensitive data.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Syft/Grype/SPDX $0 / Anchore Community $0 / Snyk Free 200 tests/mo, Team $25/dev/mo ~10k tests/mo, $0.01/test over / Anchore Enterprise from $35k/yr / Chainguard Enforce Free 10 images, Team $610/mo
Containerized Test Orchestration (K8s for Test VMs)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: k3s/KubeVirt $0 self-hosted / HKS $0.05/vCPU/hr + LB €5/mo / GKE: Free tier 1 cluster, Autopilot $74/mo per cluster + $0.10/vCPU/hr $0.014/GB-hr / EKS $0.10/hr ~$72/mo per cluster + EC2 / Rancher Prime $150/node/yr
Network Boot & Provisioning (PXE/iPXE)
Enterprise single sign-on and user provisioning. Usually required to sell to larger organizations.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: dnsmasq/iPXE/PXELINUX $0 / MAAS Community $0 self-hosted / Equinix Metal $0.50/hr per host includes Tinkerbell provisioning $0 extra / MAAS Enterprise Support $30/node/yr or $750/yr per 10 nodes / Intel RSD license included with hardware
Kernel Documentation Hosting
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: RTD Free 1 concurrent build, 100 builds/day / GitHub Pages Free 1GB storage 100GB BW/mo / Cloudflare Pages Free unlimited BW 500 builds/mo / RTD Business $20/mo 5k builds, $0.02/build over / Confluence Free 10 users, Standard $5.75/user/mo / GitBook Pro $40/mo per space
Vulnerability Scanning & CVE Feed
Keeps you secure and compliant with regulations. Required for enterprise customers and handling sensitive data.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: NVD API free 5 req/30s no key, 50 req/30s with key / Trivy $0 / OpenCVE OSS $0 / GitHub Dependabot Free unlimited / VulnCheck Community 250 req/day free, Pro $499/mo 50k req $0.002/req over / Snyk Team $25/dev/mo, $0.01/image over / Rapid7 $3.50/asset/mo
License Compliance Scanning
Keeps you secure and compliant with regulations. Required for enterprise customers and handling sensitive data.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: FOSSology/ScanCode $0 / FOSSA Free OSS unlimited public repos, Free private 2k scans/mo, Team $200/mo 10k scans $0.02/scan over / Black Duck Contact sales avg $25k-100k/yr per 100k LOC / Revenera ~$30k/yr
Test Result Database & Flaky Test Tracker
Persistent storage for your app’s data — users, products, orders. The single most important architectural decision for most projects.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: ClickHouse OSS $0 / Postgres $0 / BuildKite Test Analytics Free 10k test executions/mo, Team included $15/user/mo 200k execs $0.0001/exec over / Datadog CI Visibility $20/user/mo + $0.20/1000 pipeline min over / ClickHouse Cloud Free 30GB storage 300M rows
Binary Signing Timestamp Authority (TSA)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Sigstore Free unlimited OSS signing $0 / FreeTSA.org $0 unlimited / OpenTSA $0 / DigiCert TSA included with code signing cert $0 or standalone $299/yr unlimited / Sectigo $499/yr unlimited $0.001/stamp over if metered / GlobalSign $599/yr
Multi-Arch Cross-Compilation Farm (x86/ARM/RISC-V)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: QEMU $0 / Oracle A1 Always Free 4 OCPU 24GB forever $0 / Hetzner CAX11 €14.4/mo 4 vCPU / AWS m7g.medium $0.048/hr ~$35/mo, $0 extra for build mins / Equinix c3.small ARM $0.65/hr ~$475/mo / SiFive boards $700 one-time
Full OS Installer Build Pipeline (KIWI/osbuild/Pungi)
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: KIWI/mkosi/osbuild/Packer $0 / RHEL Image Builder hosted Free 5 builds/mo trial, then included with RHEL sub $349/yr per node / Canonical MAAS Image Builder included $0 with Ubuntu Pro $500/yr per node or Managed $200/node/mo / SUSE Manager $16k/yr
Hardware Asset Management / Lab Inventory
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Snipe-IT/NetBox/Ralph $0 self-hosted / Snipe-IT SaaS Free trial 14d, Basic $39.99/mo 500 assets $0.08/asset over, Pro $159.99/mo 2000 assets / NetBox Cloud Free 50 devices, Hobby $199/mo 250 devices $0.50/device over / Device42 from $1599/yr 100 devices, $4/device over
Secure Enclave / TPM Attestation Lab (SGX/SEV/TPM2)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: IBM TPM Sim $0, SGX SDK $0, Keylime $0 / Hetzner SGX EX101 ~$80/mo / Equinix Metal SGX m3.small $0.85/hr ~$620/mo / Azure Confidential DCsv3 $0.32/vCPU/hr ~$230/mo 8 vCPU, Attestation Service Free 1k ops/mo $0.01/10k after / Anjuna Seaglass $2000/mo
Reproducible Build Verification Infra (SLSA)
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: diffoscope/reprotest/in-toto/SLSA $0 OSS / Chainguard Academy Free 10 verified images, Team $610/mo 100 images $4.50/image over, Enterprise $36k/yr unlimited / Sigstore private $0 self-hosted, hosted via Chainguard
Long-Term Kernel Archive & WORM Storage
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: tape DIY $0 (hardware cost only) / Wasabi Trial 30d 1TB, Paid $7.99/TB/mo no egress fees $0/GB, $0 API / B2 $0.006/GB/mo + Object Lock free, download $0.01/GB / S3 Glacier Deep Archive $0.00099/GB/mo, S3 Object Lock WORM $0.023/GB/mo + $0.05/1k WORM requests / Azure Blob Immutable $0.018/GB/mo hot, $0.01/GB cool
Audit Logging & Compliance (SOC2/ISO/SOX)
Keeps you secure and compliant with regulations. Required for enterprise customers and handling sensitive data.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Wazuh/OpenSearch/auditd $0 / LogScale Community Free 16GB/day, Cloud Pro $0.15/GB ingest / Grafana Cloud 50GB logs free, Pro $29/mo / Splunk Cloud $109/mo 1GB/day, Enterprise $2000/mo + $2k/yr support / Vanta $3k/yr per framework, Drata $10k-25k/yr / Audit Trail storage $0.10/GB
Disaster Recovery for Build Infra
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Velero/Restic $0 / Hetzner Snapshots €0.011/GB/mo / B2 $0.006/GB/mo / rsync.net $0.01/GB/mo ZFS $0.02/GB mo / Veeam Community Free 10 workloads, Paid $150/yr per VM ~$15/mo, Veeam Bare Metal $300/yr / Zerto from $120/VM/mo $0.50/GB replication / Cohesity Contact sales ~$10k/yr
SLA Monitoring & On-call for Build Lab
Automates testing and deploying your code. Saves enormous time and prevents “works on my machine” releases.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Prometheus/Grafana/Uptime Kuma/Gatus $0 / Grafana Cloud Free 10k metrics 50GB logs, Pro $29/mo 15k metrics 100GB logs $8/1k metrics over $0.50/GB logs / PagerDuty Free 1 user 100 incidents, Pro $29/user/mo 500 incidents $0.05/incident over, Business $49/user/mo / Statuspage Free 100 subs, Hobby $29/mo 250 subs / Datadog Infra $15/host/mo + $0.10/custom metric over
How this enterprise system checklist works.
Each requirement below is something a enterprise system build typically needs. Pick one of the four researched options — recommended, free, cheaper or paid — add your own with "Other", or skip the requirement if your project doesn't need it. Nothing is mandatory; the plan on the right tracks what you've decided so nothing gets forgotten.
Your picks are saved in this browser automatically, so you can come back anytime. Options are researched per build level and refreshed as vendors change their plans — always verify details on the provider's page before committing.