To learn Kubernetes, you need a lot of hands-on practice.

If you are already working in a DevOps role, you get to practice Kubernetes as a part of your job. If not, home labs are your friend.

What is a Kubernetes home lab

Kubernetes home lab is a Kubernetes setup that you build for learning purpose.

At minimum, a Kubernetes home lab needs a computing capacity of 2 CPUs, 2GB memory, and 10G disk storage. This is the bare minimum. You'll benefit from having more.

You have three options to build this capacity.

Build a home lab in the Cloud

Most cloud service providers offer free tiers that you can use to build a Kubernetes home lab.

Even if a free tier is not available or the free tier does not offer enough capacity to run a bare-minimum Kubernetes cluster, you can buy a virtual server for less than $5 and build your Kubernetes home lab. (Can you still call this a home lab because it's not in your home? I believe you can. You are not using this setup to run production workloads.)

Even if the virtual server is priced at $5 a month, you can save a lot by shutting it down when you are not using.

Build a home lab on dedicated hardware

If you are ready for an upfront investment, you can buy some hardware and build a Kubernetes home lab.

Refurbished servers and switches suitable for home labs are available from many third party sellers. If you think full-sized servers are too big for a home lab, you can use a bunch of single board computers like Raspberry Pi.

Using dedicated hardware allows you to build advanced home labs. You will gain more exposure to Linux and networking. You can have the labs always running.

But you need to spend money upfront. You also need a dedicated space to keep the hardware. You need to supply continuous power to the setup. Refurbished servers, while cheaper than brand-new servers, are still expensive. If any of the hardware goes faulty, you need to replace.

The bottom line: Building a test lab with dedicated hardware is more work. But you get more room for play.

Build a home lab with spare capacity on your laptop

For all aspiring DevOps engineers, this is the best method.

You don't have to spend money to buy hardware. You don't get a cloud bill at the end of the month. You can just build home labs on your laptop by installing a virtualization software.

If you are running Linux as the operating system on your laptop, you can install KVM and start creating virtual servers with a tool like virt-manager. Or you can use virtual box.

But I use Multipass.

Mutlipass is a tool from Canonical for quickly running Ubuntu virtual servers on Linux, Mac, or Windows workstations. I prefer Multipass due to its simplicity. It has an intuitive GUI too.

The default networking mode in Multipass is highly opinionated. But you can tweak the networking to build advanced networking setups.

How to install Kubernetes in your home lab

Alright! You have virtual servers up and running. How do you install Kubernetes now?

There are two options.

Install a packaged Kubernetes distribution

If this is your first encounter with Kubernetes, you'd better start by installing a packaged Kubernetes distribution like Minikube, MicroK8s, K0s, and K3s.

These Kubernetes distributions are designed for resource constrained environments. They come with an installer that does all the work for you to setup your first Kubernetes cluster.

Install vanilla Kubernetes

Once you become familiar with the basisc of Kubernetes you can install a vanilla Kubernetes cluster on your home lab. Installing vanilla Kubernetes involves a series of steps to setup each component of Kubernetes is each of the virtual servers. But, it's a good learning experience.

If you've got enough capacity in your laptop for several virtual servers you can expand your home lab Kubernetes to a multi-node cluster.

Kubernetes services from cloud providers.

Up to now, we talked about building home labs by installing Kubernetes on our own. We call this self-managed Kubernetes.

Cloud providers also offer Kubernetes as a managed service. Using a managed Kubernetes offering, you can build a Kubernetes cluster by clicking a few buttons.

Most software teams use managed-Kubernetes in production.

But, when you are learning Kubernetes, you'd better stick to self-managed Kubernetes as it offers more learning opportunities.

Besides, managed Kubernetes offerings are highly opinionated. So, if you start learning Kubernetes with one managed Kubernetes offering and later switched to another from a different cloud provider, you will find it very confusing.

On the other hand, if you started learning by installing a Kubernetes cluster yourself, you can take up any of the managed Kubernetes services later.

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Home labs are your friend in your journey to become a DevOpe engineer.

So, if you still have not set up your home lab, do not wait to buy hardware. Start with what you have. Use your laptop and Multipass.

You can later expand your home lab to dedicated hardware or even to the cloud as we discussed.

Don't wait. Start now.

Checkout this tutorial for a quick start with Multipass.