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

# Different Ways to Set up a Cluster

One of the goals of this course is to limit the learning expense to a minimum. True to that spirit, we'll run local Kubernetes clusters for as long as possible. At one point we'll have to switch to a hosted, multi-node Kubernetes cluster. We'll do our best to postpone that for as long as possible without limiting your learning experience. For now, we'll create a **local Kubernetes cluster** on your machine.

There are quite a few ways to set up a local Kubernetes cluster:
* We could, for example, create a few nodes with [Vagrant](https://www.vagrantup.com/) (a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow) and execute quite a few shell commands that would convert them into a Kubernetes cluster.  

* We could go even further and create a VirtualBox image that would have all the required software pre-installed and use it to create Vagrant VMs. 
* We could also use Ansible to run provisioning of those images as well as to execute all the commands required to join VMs into a cluster. 

There are many other things that we could do, **but we won't**.

At this point, the idea is not to teach you all the intricacies of setting up a Kubernetes cluster. Instead, we want to get you up to speed as fast as possible and let you experience Kubernetes without sidelining that experience with installation details.

If we were using Docker Swarm, we'd have Docker for Mac or Windows (or run it natively on Linux) and execute a single `docker swarm init` command. That's all that's needed to create a local Docker Swarm cluster. *Can we accomplish the same simplicity with Kubernetes?*

The answer is **Minikube**.


In this lesson, we'll look into different ways to set up a Kubernetes cluster and figure out how to set it up locally.