Do you need a free-tier to learn Kubernetes?

This is my opinion, based on my experience and on job interviews with candidates. It is very important to understand the core components of Kubernetes — what happens when you create a new cluster and what is happening behind the scenes. This knowledge will help you troubleshoot issues in the future. In such cases, I do not believe ChatGPT can fully help if you do not already understand the fundamentals. Pods, Deployments, Services, and other basic components are relatively easy to learn through video courses or ChatGPT explanations. Since most Kubernetes clusters run in the cloud, it’s important to understand how Kubernetes communicates with a cloud provider. Bootstrap your own simple cloud. Proxmox is a good alternative and a vendor lock-in-free solution. One Proxmox node is enough to get started, 4 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM are sufficient to run two virtual machines. one Control-plane node one Worker node You will delete and recreate the worker nodes many times. This process will help you understand how the cluster works. Use well-known kubernetes distributions like Talos. It is easy to install, and GitHub provides many examples on how to set it up. Talos has a dedicated distribution for Proxmox, so you can use it without issues by following the official documentation. Most kubernetes clusters include components: CCM – cloud controller manager CNI – container network interface CSI – container storage interface Node automation – tools like Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter In well-known cloud providers, some components are configured for you…

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