Set Up Your Local Cluster

Install kubectl and minikube, start a local cluster, and verify you can run commands before tackling anything else.

beginner30 minRead → Lab → Quiz → Practice

🧠 Brain Warm-Up

🧠 Brain Warm-Up: Before touching any cluster, ask yourself: what is the difference between a local cluster (minikube) and a production cluster (EKS, GKE)? Think about networking, resource limits, and HA before reading.

Why You Need a Local Cluster

Every command in this course runs against a real Kubernetes cluster. You have two good options:

Tool	Best For	Notes
minikube	Beginners, course labs	All-in-one, best addon support
kind	Multi-node simulation, CI	Nodes run as Docker containers

This course uses minikube throughout.

What minikube Creates

Your Machine
├── minikube node (Docker container or VM)
│   ├── kube-apiserver     ← API entrypoint
│   ├── etcd               ← state store
│   ├── kube-scheduler     ← places pods on nodes
│   ├── kube-controller-manager
│   ├── kubelet            ← runs pods
│   └── kube-proxy         ← handles networking
└── ~/.kube/config         ← kubectl reads this automatically

minikube also updates ~/.kube/config automatically so kubectl points to the local cluster.

Install kubectl

# macOS
brew install kubectl

# Linux
curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
chmod +x kubectl && sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/

Install minikube

# macOS
brew install minikube

# Linux
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube

Resource Requirements

Minimum: 2 CPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB disk
Recommended for this course: 4 CPU, 8 GB RAM

Why Kubernetes Exists

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