Kubernetes is a powerful tool. It can help you manage complex applications and provide you with the ability to easily automate tasks involved in managing them. In this course, we will start exploring Kubernetes from a beginner's standpoint. We will discuss what Kubernetes is and what it does, and we will work with some of the basic functionality of Kubernetes hands-on. We will build a simple Kubernetes cluster. We will also deploy a sample microservice application to the cluster in order to explore how Kubernetes can help easily manage such applications.

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes

# Setting Up AWS CLI

We'll continue using the specifications from the `vfarcic/k8s-specs` repository, so the first thing we'll do is to go inside the directory where we cloned it, and pull the latest version.

> ℹ️  All the commands from this chapter are available in the [14-aws.sh](https://gist.github.com/04af9efcd1c972e8199fc014b030b134) Gist.



We will assume that you already have an AWS account. If that's not the case, please head over to [Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/) and sign-up.
 
>ℹ️  If you are already proficient with AWS, you might want to skim through the text that follows and only execute the commands.

The first thing we should do is get the AWS credentials.

Please open [Amazon EC2 Console](https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/), click on your name from the top-right menu and select *My Security Credentials*. You will see the screen with different types of credentials. Expand the *Access Keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key)* section and click the *Create New Access Key* button. Expand the *Show Access Key* section to see the keys.

You will not be able to view the keys later on, so this is the only chance you'll have to *Download Key File*.

We'll put the keys as environment variables that will be used by the [AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)](https://aws.amazon.com/cli/).

Please replace `[...]` with your keys before executing the commands that follow.

In this lesson, we will start preparing for the setup of our production ready cluster by setting up AWS CLI and default region environment variable.