Worth mentioning that my "got a cluster working in a month" time frame includes starting with zero Kubernetes experience, and no etcd ops experience. Using kops, pretty much anybody can get a full HA cluster running in about 15 minutes. On top of that, it's maybe 5 more minutes to deploy all the addons you'd expect for running production apps on a cloud-backed cluster.

The great thing about automation is that once you have these basic tools (Prom/Graf monitoring/alerting, ELK, node pool autoscaling, CI/CD) implemented as declarative manifests, they're deployable anywhere in minutes.