When you click the GKE(hosted Kubernetes) button on Google Cloud Platform, it's those very Salt configs that set up your nodes (and once upon a time they setup your control plane too).

Basically what's arguably the best publicly available Kubernetes setup in the world is hiding in that Salt codebase, and EVERY would-be Kubernetes admin should look at it before venturing on their own.

I used it as inspiration for my setup. But you also need a bunch of other stuff, like the CA setup and Kubelet cert generation, which are buried in the whole kube-up structure.

Yeah, agreed. CoreOS + cloud-init could remove necessity to do OS-level setup.

There's always something to do at the OS-level, which is why cloud-init configurations tend to spiral out of control with in-line scripts, configs, and binary downloads.

There's no getting away from configuration management and software installation at SOME level of your stack, and setting up a substrate for Kubernetes is no exception.