Probably that there is a lot to learn and it feels like a full time role, so looking after a small cluster say 2 hours/month I feel like I’m hacking to solve problems and not getting the deep understanding a full time sysadmin person would. Using a cloud provided solution and terraform and CI helps a lot though. I have a clone test cluster to play around with before I deploy to production.

I went from never have run docker build to maintaining docker k8s VMs running the modes, terraforms cloud load balancer so quite a learning curve. Took me ages to realise that to configure nginx ingress I needed to work with the docker image and not try to set it up via the terraform k8s config. That was a painful lesson. Not having those mental models! Doing a free online course on k8s helped a lot, after that I reached critical mass of knowledge and it got a bit easier.