I have built a prod K8S cluster by hand (back in the 1.1 days). It taught me a lot of the foundations of K8S, so I don't regret it. It is why we are using GKE.

I have built a prod K8S cluster by hand (back in the 1.1 days). It taught me a lot of the foundations of K8S, so I don't regret it. It is why we are using GKE. With GKE, most of your focus will be around (1) tooling for generating manifests, such as Helm or (forgot the name of it). I had written something called Matsuri, but that is only useful if your team is a Ruby shop. (2) what to put into the containers and how they link up. So yeah, I agree with your assessment.