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.