Crashing and burning (in a non-production environment) is an excellent motivator to develop necessary skills; being unafraid to break things and fix them when they inevitably break helps you get a deeper understanding of how the systems work, for what it’s worth.
Running an RKE cluster as VMs on my ceph+proxmox cluster. Using Rook and external ceph as my storage backend and loving it. I haven’t fully migrated all of my services, but thus far it’s working well enough for me!
Cloudflare tunnels are great but OP may not want to have to authenticate each user to their services.
Might want to check out addy.io. It’s a managed service, but I think it supports your use case.