Learning Environment Setup

As discussed in earlier chapter, it’s not necessary to have produciton level setup while learning things — we start minimal. While the basic concepts remain the same, the things you will be doing in production will differ. This is the part of the learning process — simple to advanced.

What is Our Learning Setup?

There are several tools available to set up local kubernetes cluster like: Minikube, Kind, VIND, K3s, etc. For simplicity we start with Minikube. We may introduce more tools moving forward or stick into this according to requirement. Minikube sets both control plane and worker node on the same machine — which is not what you do in produciton but we are just learning.

Since installation differs from architecture to architecture: According to your OS architecture, you should follow official installation guide to setup Minikube.

Minikube sets your local k8s cluster but we need kubectl to interact with the cluster. So, you should also install it from the official installation guide.

Everything ahead requires both minikube and kubectl. Make sure you have them ready. While k8s eventually manages containers, underlying container technology (containerd or docker to keep it simple) is required too.

Verify Setup

Going forward, these things are required — verify your setup now (linux).

Ensure kubectl is installed:

kubectl version

Client Version: v1.37.0
Kustomize Version: v5.8.1

Ensure minikube is installed:

minikube version

minikube version: v1.38.1
commit: c93a4cb9311efc66b90d33ea03f75f2c4120e9b0

Assuming you are transitioning from docker, ensure containerd and docker are running:

systemctl status containerd

● containerd.service - containerd container runtime
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/containerd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2026-09-03 06:20:32 +0545; 2min 50s ago
...

systemctl status docker

● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2026-09-03 06:20:34 +0545; 2min 57s ago
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