If you use a Mac and just want to mess around with linux try something like Orbstack(https://orbstack.dev/) to start up VMs and mess around. The benefit of this is you're going to break things a bunch as you get started. Going from there I'd start looking automating the deployment of the various components the 'old fashioned' way aka writing shell scripts/using SSH. Once you do that then go to using things like Ansible or Terraform etc.