As someone who self hosted bare metal Kubernetes on my own rack, it's a lot of work to get it set up. We used RedHat Openshift which has a pretty good solution out of the box, but the learning curve was relatively high.
That being said, once it was set up, there was not a lot of maintenance. Kubernetes is quire resilient when set up properly, and the cost savings were significant.
Try talos next time. It took minutes to setup. Red Hat docs and product names scare me since they are intentionally obtuse. I thought I wanted openshift but no way i'm paying and i couldn't figure out how to even get started. Talos was such a breeze.
The thing with OpenShift (https://github.com/okd-project/okd) is you can set it up, and then run basically one command (oc new-app .) to push almost any app to Kubernetes. All bells and whistles included.
That being said, once it was set up, there was not a lot of maintenance. Kubernetes is quire resilient when set up properly, and the cost savings were significant.