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. No cloud. A university department has hardware and a hypervisor; it doesn't have a GKE budget. Multi-tenant. Several research groups or courses need their own clusters, isolated from each other. Self-service. A student or researcher should be able to provision a cluster without a sysadmin in the loop. RBAC. Not everyone who can see a cluster should be able to destroy it. A course instructor and a first-week student need different permissions. Fully automated from zero.…