I know a couple places with cheap sailing club memberships. One works out to about $30 per month, but you can volunteer for a free membership, and another is just $75 a year. Maybe you can find something like that, and if not, then consider just moving to a new city.

The trick with Kubernetes clusters is to build and run cool, free open source services for yourself and others, because you're passionate about solving problems with tech! It's hard to do that at work because usually work is just exploitation of customers mixed with exploitation of workers and it all feels shitty. Of course, we all have to survive somehow, so do what you gotta do, but don't hate the tech.