All SSM, all the way. I even gravely considered using their IAM Anywhere capabilities to jump onto Azure or GCP instances, before that project was overcome by events

I'm cheating you a little bit, though, because for the most part once a VM gets kubelet on it, I'm off to the races. Only in very, very, very bad circumstances does getting on the actual Node help me

I also recently have started using <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide...> to even get sequestered cluster access via $(aws ssm start-session --document-name AWS-StartPortForwardingSessionToRemoteHost) although the "bootstrapping" problem of finding the instance-id to feed into --target is a pain. I wish they offered https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide... in the spirit of "yeah, yeah, just pick one" versus making me run $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filter | head -n1) type thing