If you decide to go the Kunernetes route, you can try k3sup to bootstrap your VMs k3s, it a nice half step abstraction between Ansible and running curl yourself:

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.

documentation.ubuntu.com/…/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.