Setting Up a Kubernetes (K8s) Cluster at Home for Beginners
Kubernetes (K8s) is a powerful container orchestration platform used to manage applications at scale. Building a Kubernetes cluster in your homelab allows you to experiment with cloud-native concepts, deploy containerized applications, and learn skills for production-grade environments. In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up a basic Kubernetes cluster at home. What You’ll Need At least two devices (can be physical machines, VMs, or Raspberry Pis): One as a control plane (master node). One or more as worker nodes. Linux installed on each device (Ubuntu 20.04 or newer is recommended). A reliable network connection. Basic understanding of Linux commands. Step 1: Prepare the Nodes Install Ubuntu on all devices (or use your preferred Linux distro). Update and upgrade the system on each node: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y Set static IP addresses for all nodes to ensure stability in the cluster. Configure this via /etc/netplan or your router’s DHCP settings. Disable swap on all nodes to meet Kubernetes requirements: sudo swapoff -a To make it permanent, edit /etc/fstab and comment out the swap entry. 5. Install containerd as the container runtime: ...