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. This tutorial requires access to [Google Compute Engine](https://cloud.google.com/compute).
> The results of this tutorial should not be viewed as production ready, and may receive limited support from the community, but don't let that prevent you from learning!
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.
This tutorial assumes you have access to [Google Cloud Platform](https://cloud.google.com) and the [Google Cloud SDK](https://cloud.google.com/sdk/)(148.0.0+). While GCP is used for basic infrastructure needs the things learned in this tutorial can be applied to every platform.
