If you ever want to have fun with setting up your own k8s, I recommend to start small. The author is already knowledgeable, so they probably knew from the start what they want, but a lot of this complexity is not essential.

When I deployed my first kubernetes "cluster", I just spinned a single-node "cluster" using kubeadm (today k3s is an option too) and started deploying services (with no distributed storage - everything stored using hostPath). You only need to know kubernetes basics to do this. Then you probably want to configure CNI (I recommend flannel when starting, later cilium), spin an ingress controller (I recommend nginx or traefik), deploy cert-manager (this was hard for me when I started) and you can go a long way. With time I scaled up, decided to use GitOps, and deployed many more services (including my own registry - I started with docker's own, then migrated to Gitea. Harbor is too heavy for me). And of course over time you add monitoring, alerting etc - the fun never ends (but it's all optional, you should to decide when is the right time).

Absolutely! If at all possible, go managed, preferably with a cloud provider that handles all the hard things for you like load balancing and so on.

*Sometimes* however, you want or need full control, either for compliance or economic reasons, and that's what I set out to explore :)

Agreed, this is probably the best ad for managed k8s, this and horrors stories about self managed k8s clusters falling appart.