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

# Starting Minikube to Create a Cluster

The folks behind Minikube made creating a cluster as easy as it can get. All we need to do is to execute a single command. Minikube will start a virtual machine locally and deploy the necessary Kubernetes components into it. The VM will get configured with Docker and Kubernetes via a single binary called **localkube**.




## 📝 A Note to Windows Users

You might experience problems with *VirtualBox*. If that's the case, you might want to use *Hyper-V* instead. 

* Open a Powershell Admin Window and execute the `Get-NetAdapter` command, noting the name of your network connection. 

* Create a `hyperv` virtual switch `New-VMSwitch -name NonDockerSwitch -NetAdapterName Ethernet -AllowManagementOS ＄true` replacing `Ethernet` with your network connection name. 
* Then, create the Minikube vm: `minikube start --vm-driver=hyperv --hyperv-virtual-switch "NonDockerSwitch" --memory=4096`. 

Other minikube commands such as `minikube start`, `minikube stop` and `minikube delete` all work the same whether you're using *VirutalBox* or *Hyper-V*.

A few moments later, a new Minikube VM will be created and set up, and a cluster will be ready for use.

# Understanding the Process
When we executed the `minikube start` command, it created a new VM based on the Minikube image. That image contains a few binaries. It has both [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) and [rkt](https://coreos.com/rkt/) container engines as well as *localkube* library.
> rkt is an application container engine developed for modern production cloud-native environments. 

The *localkube* library includes all the components necessary for running Kubernetes. We'll go into details of all those components later. For now, the important thing is that localkube provides everything we need to run a Kubernetes cluster locally.


In this lesson, we will run a Kubernetes cluster locally using Minikube.

Creating a Local Kubernetes Cluster with Minikube

Starting Minikube to Create a Cluster