We've been running a small Kubernetes cluster of < 30 nodes that handles a variety of workloads using kops for almost a year now. kops is a significant improvement over other provisioning tools like kube-up.sh and kube-aws and has simplified infrastructure management a great deal. We can provision a brand new cluster and a couple dozen services across multiple namespaces in less than an hour - kops helps a lot with making that process smooth and reliable.

We have run into some issues with kops. Customizing the Kubernetes executables, e.g. using a particular Docker version or storage driver, has been buggy pre-1.5. Upgrading clusters to later Kubernetes versions has left some of the kube-system services, like kube-dns, in a weird state. Occasionally we encounter issues with pods failing to schedule/volumes failing to mount - these are fixed by either restarting the Kubernetes (systemd) services on the problem nodes or by reprovisioning nodes entirely. On one occasion, a bad kops cluster update left our networking in an unrecoverable state (and our cluster inaccessible).

I don't think there are any missing pieces, the initial configuration is what usually takes the most time to set up. You'll have to become familiar with the kops source as not everything is documented. As far as running 30 clusters with a 2-person team, it's definitely feasible, just complicated when you're constantly switching between clusters.