I built mine before the 5 was released. I ended up running Ubuntu server on the nodes and configure them all using ansible playbooks (installing tailscale, k3s, updates, OS tweaks, etc.). I started looking at helm but there is so much inconsistency using community helm charts. I think writing my own would have been a better approach instead of templatizing my manifests and playbooks and doing it that way, however it is very easy to stand up a new service (assuming it's only 1-2 pods). If I end up DRY'ing my deployments it could end up being not too bad as a distinct deployment method from IaC or helm.

How do you like Pulumi? It seems similar to AWS CDK...