I’ve been setting up a baremetal Talos-based cluster on 4 SFF machines and using Flux to declaratively deploy things to the cluster. Once you wrap your head around how Flux operates, deploying things becomes fairly straightforward.

For me, the most difficult process was deploying the cluster properly, but the recent-ish video posted on the Tailscale YT channel helped a LOT.

Iirc Verizon doesnt sell Pixels that can unlock the bootloader.