A standalone Pulsar, is actually a great way to learn Pulsar. It is one command to get started: bin/pulsar standalone

It can also be used in production. You do not have to build a distributed Pulsar cluster immediately. I have multiple projects running on a standalone Pulsar cluster, because its easy to setup and requires almost no maintenance. Doing it that way makes compliance requirements for isolation simpler and with less fights. Everyone understands host/vm isolation, few understand Pulsar Tenant isolation.

If you want a distributed Apache Pulsar cluster, be prepared to work for that. We run a cluster on bare metal. We considered Kubernetes, but performance was lacking. We are not Kubernetes experts.