Resources

Core

• "Kubernetes: Up and Running" (book) - best structured deep dive once the basics click.
• kubernetes.io official tutorials - the interactive basics course is genuinely good.
• kubectl explain <resource> - the most underrated doc tool. Works offline, version-accurate.

Courses and labs

• KodeKloud CKA/CKAD courses - guided labs in a real terminal. The CKAD syllabus is a decent forcing function even if you skip the exam.

Tools

• kind - disposable local clusters: https://kind.sigs.k8s.io
• k9s - cluster TUI, use it daily: https://k9scli.io
• kompose - compose-to-k8s converter, cheat-sheet use only: https://kompose.io
• helm - https://helm.sh
• kustomize - built into kubectl: https://kustomize.io

What to defer (layer two)

Service meshes (Istio), authoring operators/CRDs, multi-cluster, GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux). All real, none needed for the first migration. GitOps is the first one worth adding afterwards.