This tutorial will walk you through setting up Kubernetes the hard way. This guide is not for people looking for a fully automated command to bring up a Kubernetes cluster. If that's you then check out [Google Container Engine](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine), or the [Getting Started Guides](http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/).
This tutorial is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to help people understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster.
The target audience for this tutorial is someone planning to support a production Kubernetes cluster and wants to understand how everything fits together. After completing this tutorial I encourage you to automate away the manual steps presented in this guide.
The following labs assume you have a working [Google Cloud Platform](https://cloud.google.com) account and a recent version of the [Google Cloud SDK](https://cloud.google.com/sdk/) (116.0.0+) installed. While GCP will be used for basic infrastructure needs, the things learned in this tutorial apply to every platform.
