> At my company we just set everything up using cloud-config. A systemd unit boots the kubelet on each server, and static k8s manifests are loaded by the kubelet to run the rest of the k8s components as pods.

This is the exact same methodology that i've been using and it's worked rather well. The current CoreOS documentation [1] on running Kubernetes follows this methodology too.

[1] https://coreos.com/kubernetes/docs/latest/getting-started.ht...