With a Kubernetes autoscaler, this takes you ~20 Minutes to setup pod autoscaling. If you run your k8s on say GKE, setting up node autoscaling is another 5 Minutes.
* do i need to factor in experience with VMs?
* do i need to factor in OS and networking theory learnt in college?
* do i need to factor in high school algebra?
* do i need to factor in learning the english language?
Of course you need to factor in learning k8s. Before, it was learning VM's+ {ansible, chef, salt}, before that it was prob something else.
In practice - the application running in the pod has to be aware of this, and the most intensive part are rarely the bottleneck. Most of the time this is an architecture issue, not a resource issue. This takes time and experience, and overhauling a platform to remove a bottleneck is usually very painful if you have a bit more complex setup.