Kubernetes is a great skill that sprawls out into many parts of the stack. Normally I encourage people to use it with a cloud provider, but based on the enviro

Kubernetes is a great skill that sprawls out into many parts of the stack. Normally I encourage people to use it with a cloud provider, but based on the environment you're describing it might actually be more fun for them to build it from the ground up. People talk about this being a herculean task but it's really not so bad if you follow a guide like Kelsey Hightowers or even just the standard docs and you'll learn a lot along the way. Once they have the Kubernetes cluster they can package up apps into containers and deploy them into the cluster or build interesting custom resource definitions which also turns out to be easier than it sounds. You may find what they build is an interesting prototype for future infra of your own. I find kube to be quite a nice platform to work with.