But using rancher 2.0 has helped a bunch to ease me into it. Now I feel comfortable enough to start up a cluster on my own without it.
Longhorn is pretty easy to set up, but it seems to have some issues actually working (and slow).
I'm also trying out rook/ceph at the moment.
Currently the cluster I'm talking about is being heavily used for QA testing purposes and Beta testing of applications. Kubernetes and a small operator I've written allows us to dynamically create QA servers for issues as developers finish their changes. Beta testing is easily deployed by a helm chart I wrote up.
Next we'll start up the production cluster and use it for internal applications and finally we'll be moving over our customer facing applications.