More important than whether it’s easy or hard, is the fact that it’s unnecessary. GKE is great and you only pay for your compute (as opposed to EKS, which is over $140/mo for the control plane, a move which always struck me as a terrible business decision).

I maintain two prod and two test environments: AWS+kops (since before EKS existed), Alibaba+kubeadm (because China), and two local ones that used to be minikube but are now just kubeadm. I spent a total of about two months getting the knowledge to do that, and these days I spend about 4 hours a week on maintenance. I do minor version upgrades but put off major ones because there’s not much business value and upgrades can break stuff.

It’s my least favorite part of my job. I’d rather be coding or doing architecture, which is what I spend most of my time doing. We’ll be moving the AWS stuff to GKE in a couple months. Still haven’t heard much on the quality of Alibaba’s offering. Their IaaS is solid but some of their other services will sometimes throw errors that return 0 hits on google, no documentation, which scares me.

Depends on what you mean by hard. Bootstrapping a K8s control plane? Not so much, kubeadm does all the heavylifting for you. Keeping your install recent, etcd performant and backed up, maintaining and scaling underlying filesystems etc. is still a full-time job for production usage imho. Essentially you'll find yourself operating a number of distributed systems below your application stack.

You would have to follow this the whole way: https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

There are plenty of tools that do a lot of "the hard way" heavy lifting for personal deployments of Kubernetes, like kubeadm, though doing "the hard way" at least once is good so you know what actually is going on.