[placardloop]

Proxmox doesn’t preclude you from having k8s. You can create VM(s) in Proxmox and then install k8s on them, then run your app workloads in k8s.

You do have to treat Proxmox VMs like “pets, not cattle” since they are more difficult to automate, but that’s the same story as if you were managing your k8s host on bare metal too. The benefit with Proxmox-hosted VMs though is that you can use Proxmox for whole-VM backups and migrations, so you can have the best of both proxmox and k8s!

[globular-toast]

Something like Talos gets you pretty close to cattle. You just boot a fresh VM from a generic ISO, then run a pre-defined config against it and it will join the cluster. I haven't looked into it but in theory you could pre-bake that config into the boot ISO so adding a new node would literally be just add a new VM using a template. Of course you'd want to remove the node from the cluster cleanly before just deleting it, though.

[alias_neo]

I run a couple of Talos clusters on Proxmox at home; I haven't templated them yet as they're pretty static clusters, but I suppose you could use a Proxmox Snippet with the config in and point new Talos nodes at it when they boot.

I've also been using a Terraform module for Proxmox at work to deploy stuff, but there's only two, both community modules and neither is gold/platinum tier, good enough for homelab though I'd say.