Maybe it's because I have very good spatial intelligence, but I always found PKI to be a lot simpler than most people made it out to be. People treating me like some sort of priest of the church of crypto when generating and signing keys is really not that hard.

PKI is like a kitchen knife. The hard part is not getting one, or picking it up, it's using it without cutting yourself. But people treat the 'knife' like all aspects are magical.

I've found it ok to understand maybe 70% of PKI, but that I always need to review that last 30% (OSCP stapling, cross signing certs, whatever the heck the formats are, different extensions, more that I'm forgetting).

I've put my favorite learning resources and tools into https://www.bbkane.com/blog/learn-ssl/

I was at IBM for about five months, a few years ago.

It took from ~2 weeks after my start date until ~1 week before my last day to get a vSphere cluster provisioned for my development work.

PKI? Sounds hard, by comparison.

Probably outsourced internal dev environments to Kyndryl too?

Surprisingly no, not for this project. It was an acquisition, and the developers had come with - so had their data center. I was hired to try to help move it out of their on-prem location. They'd hired me specifically saying it was going to AWS; then they went "whoops! all IBM Cloud" a couple weeks in, and they never actually got me a fully working environment to build against in the few months I was there. (The one nice thing I'd say is that teams from all over IBM were incredibly helpful; some externally-facing consultants actually volunteered a couple hours to try to help undo whatever Softlayer had open-palm slammed onto my virtual machines. They too were confused.)