Good learning resources for managing resources in local Kubernetes clusters?

Hey there all,

I’m building a private k8s cluster for my company and I’m trying to get a better understanding of the types of resources that are available for local clusters versus those running on GCP, AWS or Azure.

Googling on the subject has helped me some but I’m having a hard time getting an overall picture of “these are the resources I have and this is how and when I should use them.” I get the “big” picture from the cloud POV, but what’s left for the individual cluster?

Specifically, I’m trying to understand:

  1. Best resources for file-systems. How to set up external provisioners for things like CIFS, etc.
  2. How to create local external load balancers, etc.

And the more experienced reading this will probably say, "Yeah, you’re figuring this out today but you ALSO want … " I’d be very open to any thoughts there.

TIA