> Just like I would not recommend standing up OpenStack from the ground up in order to deploy your monolithic application across a set of virtual machines, I do

> Just like I would not recommend standing up OpenStack from the ground up in order to deploy your monolithic application across a set of virtual machines, I don't recommend rolling your own Kubernetes cluster either. You should strongly consider leveraging a fully managed Kubernetes offering such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Digital Ocean's Managed Kubernetes, or Azure Kubernetes Service. The rest seems reasonable, but I disagree strongly with that claim. If it's worth using the tool then it's also worth learning how it works. Even just kubespraying a cluster myself helped me build a much stronger mental model of how Kubernetes works than trying to take over a colleague's black box Kops setup. GKE or another managed service would have been even worse. Setting up a small cluster isn't that hard, and it will teach you a lot about the internals and how things can go south (and what to do when that inevitably happens).