This isn’t my experience at all. I as one person taught myself over the past couple years docker then Kubernetes and am now managing a small 3 node bare metal cluster on my own.

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.

I strongly feel that Rancher 2.0 is just not ready for release yet. I run into so many weird edge cases using it, and don’t get me started on persistent storage...

Longhorn is pretty easy to set up, but it seems to have some issues actually working (and slow).

I've had issues with longhorn as well, though the problem I was having (volume attachment race condition) is supposedly resolved by upgrading kubernetes.

I'm also trying out rook/ceph at the moment.

Just curious, is your cluster used in production or for any serious purpose?

Not for production yet. I'm in the process of moving our infrastructure from VMs that no one was really managing to Kubernetes. We're about to put together the production cluster and move over a couple of the applications that are fully ready and have been tested on the development cluster for a while.

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.