As the former owner of GKE at our company, read the official k8s docs. They are good. Read them all.
For example, for Docker Swarm and the Compose format, you have this: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3...
[0] https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-ap...
[1] kubectl explain deploy --recursive
I know that people like to use something like Kustomize (https://kustomize.io/) and Helm (https://helm.sh/) at least last i checked, but it's also really nice to be able to read up on everything without necessarily following tutorials and such, or using specialized tools.
For example, with Docker Swarm, if i want to change how restarts would be handled, i have a really easy reference available: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3...
But with Kubernetes, in the first linked page i find a short description (just scroll down a bit or CTRL+F "restartPolicy") which doesn't offer further parameters: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-ap...
To its credit, there is a link to another page as well which contains more information: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod-lifec...
That said, usability wise i'd have to spend more time to figure out how to get my containers/pods restarting just once every 1 minute as opposed to whatever the default is (say, low end cluster with limited resources) with Kubernetes instead of other technologies, due to this difference.
With K8s I guess we are between a really decent (!) documentation that doesn't work very well as a "tutorial", and third party resources that does that.
It does make things harder at the beginning, but is still much better then, say, Hashicorps docs: "here is a cool starting tutorial that covers basics you'll need for the first 30 minutes. That is all, look other things up in the code". For a longer while I felt this was the case with Vault or Consul.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-ap...