I've run vanilla k8s for about 3 years now in prod but am also fairly familiar (and really like) Openshift Origin. I usually tell people asking this question th

I've run vanilla k8s for about 3 years now in prod but am also fairly familiar (and really like) Openshift Origin. I usually tell people asking this question the following; OO comes with a bunch of really nice quality of life improvements that are missing (but in a lot of cases can be added via 3rd party TPR/CRDs/etc) in k8s but you aren't deviating so far from k8s that you won't be able to go work on vanilla k8s in the future. Not at all. Most of the additional stuff are annotations that simply wouldn't do anything and you'd remove them if you moved from OO to k8s. I think that if you're brand new to the environment OO can really help you get running quickly. You just have to make sure that you do in fact dive in to the actual k8s yaml and deal with ingresses, prometheus, grafana, RBAC, etc at some point. I haven't used OO in awhile but I believe you could successfully do most of what I do day to day via yaml/json through the OO UI. On the flip side a lot of people will probably tell you to start from k8s, whether that's GKE or AWS or minikube or wherever and go through the k8s the hard way. Personally, and I help people quite frequently on the k8s slack, I feel like that leads a lot of people down a path of frustration. It may be perfect for your style of learning or it may just scare you off. Now when it comes to OO you are at the behest of their releases. Their most recent release was Nov 2017 and k8s 1.10 was just cut. I'm not sure what version OO is on now, evidently they changed their versioning numbers to not correspond to the k8s version. Join #kubernetes-users and #kubernetes-novice on slack.k8s.io if you need any help. It's a vibrant community. You can message me directly @ mikej if you'd like. edit: Ok OO 3.7 is k8s 1.9, that's perfect. I wait a few months before jumping into new major.