If you end up not liking (or not wanting to learn) k8s, check out Hashicorp's Nomad. I set it up recently, it's great for a homelab, and a bit more flexible than k8s because it can also run raw executables and VMs.
Consul + Nomad makes for an excellent home lab setup, using docker, podman, raw binaries, etc, as you observe. It strongly recommends 3-node cluster, but works fine on a single host if you don't need the distributed / HA aspect. We've been running it in production at work for a couple of years and it's been rock solid.
The big problem with Nomad is that it's not as popular as k8s -- so while you can leverage docker hub, there's fewer oven-ready packs for more complex systems, eg cortex metrics or mimir, as current challenges for us.
Hashicorp is building up a public repository [1] which is great to see, but it's a long way from having the same scope as the collected repositories of helm charts.
the biggest problem with nomad is it just punts on networking (so it really is just a scheduler) and it's quite a bit of work to get it set up right for dynamic workloads
Consul + Nomad makes for an excellent home lab setup, using docker, podman, raw binaries, etc, as you observe. It strongly recommends 3-node cluster, but works fine on a single host if you don't need the distributed / HA aspect. We've been running it in production at work for a couple of years and it's been rock solid.
The big problem with Nomad is that it's not as popular as k8s -- so while you can leverage docker hub, there's fewer oven-ready packs for more complex systems, eg cortex metrics or mimir, as current challenges for us.
Hashicorp is building up a public repository [1] which is great to see, but it's a long way from having the same scope as the collected repositories of helm charts.
[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-pack-community-registry