[mattbrewsbytes]

It sort of depends on what you are building. I work on web apps and services and there are so many things in k8s and GCP to use that its like rabbit-holes all the way down. You can get overwhelmed easily with stuff you probably don't need.

You can work on what is running on your container(s) locally using docker. I would suggest reading thru k8s docs and using minikube (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/hello-minikube/) to understand things.

Start small and get basics working, then iterate. You will likely experience aha moments later on and want to re-do things. The good thing is you are defining infrastructure via software.