I have a yubikey setup to autounlock my laptop luks. It’s a bit of a pain to get setup the first time then it just works. Not sure it’s worth it for a home server unless it has some real valuable data on it. And in that case you wouldn’t want the key stored anywhere near it.

We allow registration with a one time token only and a hidden registration page. The token is generated via bot by an admin/mod.

You can get started pretty easily with Podman desktop and kind. Then you have a small self-contained cluster to mess around with, that also functions as a dev environment. Another option, and how I first learned, was with free credits from GCP. I realize this is self-hosted, just providing options for learning…

I’ve always liked Digital Ocean tutorials for getting stuff done. This one shows you how to deploy some things and links out to official documentation for further details: https://k8s-ops.net/posts/getting-started-with-kubernetes-digitalocean/

These are also good free tutorials: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/devops/kubernetes-tutorial/

Once you are comfortable with kubectl and basic deployments, then look into helm.