Haven’t gotten around to testing Talos enough, but I’m very enthusiastic about the idea. The little I’ve tested it has been great. My reasoning is (from my point of view ofc): maintaining an OS(Linux/windows/what have you) is pain, maintaining Kubernetes is pain. If I can I want to put all my effort into one of them. The regular OSes are made to do anything, Talos is made for one specific thing which hopefully reduces the attack and maintenance surface a lot. You also get a fair amount of handholding with Talos compared to raw Kubernetes.

No idea about the windows server part.

If your docker services is running with docker compose, there’s a tool called kompose.io that will help you. Haven’t tried it, but as most k8s things it probably need some adjustments.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I9PkvZ80BQ is an alright overview of the idea k8s. This thing called k3s.io is a nice staying point for testing k8s out

Not sure if the following will help you, but it helped me so I’ll share:

• Kubernetes is isn’t specifically designed for running services. It’s a generalized tool to help you implement a declarative pattern for your compute
• A lot of the hate K8s gets is actually due to the declarative paradigm. There’s still a lot of tasks people don’t consider worthy of describing. In k8s you’re supposed to describe everything