I was in the same boat as you until I needed to learn how to use it in my $dayjob. It was like discovering a new continent. I couldn't care less about it before, but the moment I realized it's a kind of cloud OS I was astounded by how this thing is genius. It's the kind of thing that gives you dopamine rushes when you use it. Something about how there is a solution to every problem you didn't know even mattered turns it into a magical perfect software. I just love it.

There is something special about complex systems that just-work(tm)

I was in this state a few weeks ago. I spent a bit of time familiarizing myself then wrote up my learnings as a series of exercises.

If you think of docker as "kinda like vms except not really" and k8s as "kinda like deploying and composing docker containers but not really", this may be for you:

https://ojensen.net/infra/understanding-k8s-1

It's actually really neat, i wish i had bothered to learn it years ago.

If you can get it implemented for anything you can’t be fired.

Kubernetes is for docker what your init system is for daemons.

It's for running a massive number of docker containers and automatically managing them and scaling them up and down on demand. It is also so famously brutally complex that basically you need a dedicated Kube expert to handle it.

You... don't know what Kubernetes is... pretty impressive, honestly.

Its 2026 and its the de facto method of deploying software basically everywhere.

You gotta really work for it to not know what its for by now.