kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Kubernetes The Hard Way is an educational curriculum designed to teach the fundamental architecture and operational requirements of container orchestration platforms. It provides a structured, hands-on learning path that guides users through the manual bootstrapping of a multi-node cluster from scratch, intentionally avoiding automated installers to ensure a deep understanding of how individual control plane and worker node components interact.

The project distinguishes itself by requiring the manual configuration of every layer of the infrastructure, including the generation of cryptographic identities for mutual authentication and the establishment of encrypted communication channels between distributed components. Participants gain practical experience in managing distributed key-value consensus, configuring network-overlay routing for pod communication, and handling the lifecycle of system services through manual configuration files.

This guide covers the entire provisioning process, from setting up compute resources to implementing security protocols and managing binary-based service deployments. By building the system piece by piece, users develop the operational knowledge necessary to troubleshoot complex failures in production environments. The tutorial requires four virtual or physical machines and provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the steps needed to establish a functional cluster environment.