Kubernetes requires a set of machines to host the Kubernetes control plane and the worker nodes where containers are ultimately run. In this lab you will provision the compute resources required for running a secure and highly available Kubernetes cluster across a single [compute zone](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones).
> Ensure a default compute zone and region have been set as described in the [Prerequisites](./01-prerequisites.md#set-a-default-compute-region-and-zone) lab.
The Kubernetes [network model](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/#the-kubernetes-network-model) assumes a flat network in which containers and nodes can communicate with each other. In cases where this is not desired [network policies](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/network-policies/) can limit how groups of containers are allowed to communicate with each other and external network endpoints.
A [subnet](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/vpc#vpc_networks_and_subnets) must be provisioned with an IP address range large enough to assign a private IP address to each node in the Kubernetes cluster.
> An [external load balancer](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/network) will be used to expose the Kubernetes API Servers to remote clients.
The compute instances in this lab will be provisioned using [Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS](https://ubuntu.com/server), which has good support for the [containerd](https://github.com/containerd/containerd) container runtime. Each compute instance will be provisioned with a fixed private IP address to simplify the Kubernetes bootstrapping process.
Each worker instance requires a pod subnet allocation from the Kubernetes cluster CIDR range. The pod subnet allocation will be used to configure container networking in a later exercise. The `pod-cidr` instance metadata will be used to expose pod subnet allocations to compute instances at runtime.
> The Kubernetes cluster CIDR range is defined by the Controller Manager's `--cluster-cidr` flag. In this tutorial the cluster CIDR range will be set to `10.200.0.0/16`, which supports 254 subnets.
Create three compute instances which will host the Kubernetes worker nodes:
SSH will be used to configure the controller and worker instances. When connecting to compute instances for the first time SSH keys will be generated for you and stored in the project or instance metadata as described in the [connecting to Linux VMs](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/connect/standard-ssh) documentation.