Been going through that process the past few days on Scaleway, as they don't have a hosted K8. It's... tough... but I'm learning a lot and have a much deeper understanding of K8s clusters from an operational perspective now. I have a much deeper understanding of the magic happening behind the scenes to keep everything talking to each other, and even if I wind up on a hosted solution in the end, it's been invaluable.

Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster is easy. You just have to learn a few key concepts to write your own .yaml definitions. Also, some open source frameworks come with the .yaml definitions already.