I've had good experiences using Rancher (https://rancher.com/) to operate k8s clusters. It provides a nice management interface, which handles common use-cases really well. Grabbing per-container logs or getting a shell into a container becomes trivially easy.

Admittedly, operation via Rancher comes with its own complexities: setting up security groups and IAM roles. These are documented of course, but as you say: minimum effort remains non-trivial.