Why not do both? I run proxmox on my physical hardware, then have guest VMs within proxmox that run k8s.
Advantages of proxmox:
Proxmox makes it easy to spin up VMs for non self host purposes (say I want to play with NixOS)
Proxmox snapshots make migrations and configuration changes a bit safer (I recently messed up a postgres 15 migration and was able to roll back in a button press)
You can then just run docker images through Proxmox, but I like k8s (specifically k3s) because:
Advantages of k8s:
Certmanager means your HTTP services automatically get assigned TLS certs essentially for free (once you've set up cert manager for the first time, anyway)
I find k8s' YML-based configuration easier to track and manage. I can spin my containers up fresh just from my config, without worrying about stray environment settings I might not have backed up.
k8s makes it easy for me to reason about which services are exposed internally to each other, and which are exposed on the host outside of my k8s cluster.
k8s services get persistent DNS and IPs within the cluster, so configuring nodes to talk to each other is very easy.
And yeah, this way I get to learn two technologies rather than one ๐
Why not do both? I run proxmox on my physical hardware, then have guest VMs within proxmox that run k8s.
Advantages of proxmox:
You can then just run docker images through Proxmox, but I like k8s (specifically k3s) because:
Advantages of k8s:
And yeah, this way I get to learn two technologies rather than one ๐