I’ve heard guix has some kind of container management thing. I’ve been thinking about trying it anyway.
MetalLB for your loadbalancing needs, prometheus/grafana etc.
And microk8s supports multiply nodes now as well.
I've been using it couple of years for many types of workloads and it's been a pleasant experience.
Ansible + docker-compose.yml to manage apps on 1-3 servers. You just install docker and that's it. Swarm configuration is 95% similar to compose file you use locally if you're into developing with Docker.
It has couple of edges if you try to use it for complex setups but for apps with < 5 devs and < 10 services it's really simple. You can still migrate to K8s when you hire dedicated DevOps team because you're running containers and all your setup documented in docker-compose file.
it's understandably complex, even if many parts are pretty standard (eg. the sysctl stuff, and installing dependencies is basically dnf/yum/apt/apk or exit and let the user do it).
since the most error prone parts were/are setting up the TLS stuff that got automated first (in the form of kubeadm install), and the rest just remains in "run this" form.
but the k3s installer is just a one liner call to a bash script. though then you have to make sure to include the magic env vars to get what you want.