I attempted to build a K8s based image catalog and management system a few years ago, and progress was very slow. Took 2 months to get the first vaporware demo put together.

This year I'm building and IoT data management platform and I've already built two demos of the product and am adding a bunch of features for a third. Nothing is vaporware about it. All in about 4 months.

The big wins have been system config, debugging, and exploration. I was able to build an Arrow Flight SQL backend to use as an interface and try it out with some use cases, decide it wasn't going to work, and replace it with something else, all in about two weeks. Would have taken far longer before, if I would have been able to do it at all. I knew nothing about Flight SQL before trying it out.