vault-secrets-operator VS cluster-api

For home use, I wouldn't bother with Vault unless that's really what you want to learn. Then it's worth looking into setting something up where you could use vault secrets, using one of the available options (I haven't seen the vault-secrets-operator being mentioned).

It is but it affects vault-secrets-operator too, see https://github.com/ricoberger/vault-secrets-operator/issues/104 (and no, I’ve only use vault-secrets-operator)

If you are using an external KMS in any case, then there are other options, such as the kubernetes-external-secrets operator that was originally started by GoDaddy and the externalsecret-operator from Container Solutions. If you use HashiCorp Vault, you also have the option of using the Vault Secrets operator. This works similarly to the Sealed Secrets Operator, but instead of managing its own key material, it retrieves the secrets from Vault. The CNCF Technology Radar from January 2021 provides an overview of the types of tools that are available for secrets management.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how easy and fast it is to deploy Sveltos on an RKE2 cluster with the help of ArgoCD, register two RKE2 Cluster API (CAPI) clusters and create a ClusterProfile to deploy Prometheus and Grafana Helm charts down the managed CAPI clusters.

4. Having moved to a container orchestrator, all of my nodes are immutable. Hardware and VM instances _can_ be born magically into existence. Nearly all infra providers support [cluster-api](https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/). Network infrastructure can now be managed with TF, so I go that route.

## Linux curl -L https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/releases/download/v1.4.4/clusterctl-linux-amd64 -o clusterctl sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 clusterctl /usr/local/bin/clusterctl ## Mac brew install clusterctl

Did you ever try CAPI? https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api

You might find interesting the capi-rancher-import k8s operator we use in Sylva, it would adopt in Rancher server the Cluster API created k8s clusters (with bootstrap provider kubeadm or even rke2 - you can lookup CAPBR for the latter). I understand your clusters are not created by Cluster API, so if you could move the workloads/resources to new clusters created by Cluster API, this can come handy. (Adoption of non-CAPI clusters into CAPI is not yet a standard practice, more in https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api/issues/7776)

Most of the comments have mentioned older tools like kubespray, Ansible, Rancher etc. I would suggest the cloud native way using ClusterAPI or use a tool that relies on ClusterAPI in the backend called Talos

Cluster API

Sveltos is a powerful open source project that makes managing Kubernetes add-ons a breeze. It automatically discovers ClusterAPI powered clusters and allows you to easily register any other cluster (like GKE). Then, it seamlessly manages Kubernetes add-ons across all your clusters.