Hi @rtrive , Did you have a look at Confluent Operator? I think you might find it useful to make your life easier in keeping Confluent running on k8s.
Having a look at the architecture in the docs page, the approach would be to have your pods sit behind Load Balancer, and you would just use one address from your code
In terms of the automation, I guess one option would be to separate the deployment of connectors from the actual connect Images. In the connect pods you will need to install the connectors, sure, or use an image with the connectors already installed. But you could leave it to another pod (a configuration one) the task to create the connectors using the REST API of Connect.
Have a look at this great post from @rick : Self managed Connectors on K8s
Let us know if you need more details!