Kubernetes is the right tool for some type of issues. If you want to host low complexity infrastructure like a simple website but still want to use containers go with nomad / docker swarm.

If you do need that capability, Kubernetes is invaluable.

If you don't, plain old Docker and Ansible is a much better combination. Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity that doesn't pay for itself if you don't really need that much flexibility.

You should learn this. Almost every company moving to the cloud with containers is leveraging it. I'd start with something simple like a GKE cluster on Google Cloud. Deploy a website using nginx and go from there!

None of this will be as valuable as porting an actual production application over and running into all the quirks though.