Or a piling or filing or filling or recording.

Just writing deployments by hand? That’s probably not going to be super fun to manage across a couple clusters and a bunch of namespaces. Might be worth looking at kustomize a bit before you get to having a real prod environment. I use helm at work but it seems like people consider kustomize to be the new hotness.

Windows 95 OSR2.1 (with USB support!) -> RedHat 5.1 (from a CD included in a book at the local Barnes and Noble) -> Debian 2.1 (or so? apt was a fucking revelation. RH5.1 was pre-Yum) -> experimented with Gentoo in college for a couple months (doesn’t everyone?) -> Debian -> Ubuntu (maybe around 8.04?) -> (a bunch of cycles between Debian, Elementary and Ubuntu) -> back on Debian now and it feels like home :) (but I have Elementary, Haiku and Ubuntu on some old laptops I play with sometimes)

• As long as you have something besides prod you’re probably fine for now. If you need dev to be more “real” later you can add it. It’s a two way door: https://shit.management/one-way-and-two-way-door-decisions/
• Interactions between k8s pods during a deploy, and PVs moving between nodes mainly. K8s just has a metric butt ton of moving parts and as you deploy more stuff to it over time you increase that number of moving parts
• yeah, one namespace per dev could be fine. Are you using helm? Kustomize?

On mobile so I’m not going to get into the weeds too much but I do have a couple questions that might help you make a decision:

• Do you have a “staging” or “testing” environment where things are deployed first before they go to prod? If so it might not be a huge deal to have the dev’s individual environments not be exactly what prod looks like
• Are you actually in an HA type scenario where you expect updates to not actually cause downtime? If you can tolerate the odd 2-5 minutes of downtime now and then during releases then you don’t need to go that crazy making sure all your pod deployment strategies are exactly perfect. That means you can probably tolerate more divergence between dev and prod
• Are the devs expected to get all their containerization stuff exactly right before going to prod? Or is that mostly your job? If the expectation is on then they need the tools to test their stuff. If it’s on you then you just need to figure out what you need to accomplish that.

Anyways, welcome to the k8s admin club and may whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul.