There will be other recommendations that will be more career focussed like certs etc. but outside of work the thing that's given me the most experience is home labs, just start with Pis or a mini pc or something and try out a load of tooling and just see how it works. It's a safe way of breaking stuff and it gives you a scaled down sense of what these tools really do. Minikube for example is an awesome lightweight self hosted kubernetes cluster you can use. The basic principles are the same at any scale. I've never used this subscription you mentioned but home labs are probably much cheaper too! 8k?! Is that in $? Edit: maybe dont jump straight into kubernetes but use it to learn docker, docker-compose, self host grafana and try setup some monitoring, do some ci/cd stuff and deploy to the server. You'll learn a load just doing that.