If you decide to go the Kubernetes route, you can try k3sup to bootstrap your VMs k3s, it a nice half step abstraction between Ansible and running curl yourself:
https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup
I’ve landed on k3s as my k8s distro in my environment for a number of reasons. It seems to have the “mindshare” of selfhosters, and theres lots of k3s documentation to peruse. I also really like that you can preload manifest files if you do decide to use Ansible, which makes cluster deploys that much more organized.
If you want to go a little off beat, you could try “Canonical K8s (not Microk8s)” as a snap. That worked REALLY well, and lets you do cool shit like “k8s enable loadbalancer” to automatically enable whole components for you, if you just want to focus on “consuming” Kubernetes instead of building it. I did notice a little overhead doing it as a snap, but my Proxmox node that runs the VM is purposely low spec (Celeron quad core if you believe it, 7 tdp tho)…so your hardware wouldn’t likely notice a difference.
https://documentation.ubuntu.com/canonical-kubernetes/release-1.32/snap/tutorial/getting-started/
If youre doing Proxmox already, if you don’t already have a VM template and/or Terraform/OpenTofu with Proxmox operator…it may help to tool on that too. Easier to destroy/build VMs when you get frustrated.
Happy to oblige your request stranger.
Softserve is perfectly usable, especially if your needs are more basic (its for you, no need for PRs, etc). The only gotcha is you’ll need a ed55219 key to use it.
It has been stable for me the last few years I’ve known about it. Ive run it as a container of some sort for that entire time. It’s definitely still maturing though, with more features added semi frequently.
I use it for literally everything I want self hosted, which is like 7-8 git repos for different things.