Building an on-prem Kubernetes cluster manager - Part 1: Why, and what it looks like

I started Kubesmith as a learning project: I wanted to understand the full stack under a managed Kubernetes offering by building one myself, on hardware I could touch. The scope grew into something that could plausibly run as an internal tool for a university department - self-service Kubernetes clusters for student projects and research groups, on the department's own Proxmox hosts, without going through IT for every request. The problem, concretely The requirements I designed for: On-prem only