Just to be clear: You can run Kubernetes on a single node. It just wont be "production ready", because the minimum qualifications of "production ready" has raised in Kube world. A single node running anything isn't production ready, let alone Kube. A single node running a nginx server isn't "production ready" anymore.

But Kubeadm will still do it. Kops if you're on AWS. GKE if you're on GCP. Just Docker would be easier to set up though, and that's what the OP means.

I love how there is a plurality of solutions which seem to address everything but your use case...

I would probably just use either docker-compose or systemd+runc for a single node, then use Ansible to manage configurations. Kubernetes strongly assumes you've got a cluster, not a single node.

To be honest for something small and simple I’d just throw up a Rancher server and call it from Ansible.