You need to understand the basics of managing a Kubernetes environment, including what an environment is, why you need more than one, common cluster challenges that many developers face, and how to manage these environments. An environment includes things outside of your software, such as operating systems, hardware, databases, data, security policies, and network configurations. You may have multiple environments for development, staging, production, feature development, testing, user acceptance testing, and disaster recovery. Common challenges when using Kubernetes clusters include managing external environments, database accessibility, availability issues, wasted resources, and strict isolation requirements. Namespaces can help overcome these challenges by providing a way to isolate workloads within the cluster while still sharing common resources. Managing environments is an important part of software delivery and requires automation and configuration to ensure efficient use of resources and scalability.