Have you taken a look at Rancher [0]? Easy to spin up a couple nodes and manage them in a single place. It takes care of most of the issues I've found tedious for you with no issue.
Thank you, but yes I have already tried Rancher. I have had it running with lets encrypt, etc. But it was pretty difficult to juggle all the different concepts: k8s has different concepts than rancher. What I also didn't like was when I had setup some things with the UI, I couldn't figure out how to create yamls for them.