You can get started pretty easily with Podman desktop and kind. Then you have a small self-contained cluster to mess around with, that also functions as a dev environment. Another option, and how I first learned, was with free credits from GCP. I realize this is self-hosted, just providing options for learning…
I’ve always liked Digital Ocean tutorials for getting stuff done. This one shows you how to deploy some things and links out to official documentation for further details: https://k8s-ops.net/posts/getting-started-with-kubernetes-digitalocean/
These are also good free tutorials: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/devops/kubernetes-tutorial/
Once you are comfortable with kubectl and basic deployments, then look into helm.


I’ve been using zed, it has solid python integration and is way faster than vscode (oss or otherwise). I believe python debugging is supported now, but it’s not quite as advanced as PyCharm.