This is going to be a bit of my grumpy-greybeard, but again: if you’re learning, then something like Docker and docker-compose is much simpler and less prone to fuckups than a bunch of K8s.

If you don’t know ANYTHING about what you’re doing, starting with the simplest tools and then deciding if you want to learn the more complicated ones is probably a less insane path than jumping right into the configuration-as-code DevOps pipeline.

And, at that point, you should have your “production” and “testing” environments set up in such a way they won’t eat each other when you do an oops.