By Vivian Chiamaka Okose | DevOps Engineer

If you have been putting off learning Kubernetes because it feels overwhelming, this post is for you.

This week I completed a 9 hands-on labs covering the core building blocks of Kubernetes: Pods, ReplicaSets, Deployments, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, health probes, and all three Service types. I ran everything locally on a KIND (Kubernetes IN Docker) cluster inside WSL Ubuntu on Windows, with zero cloud costs.

Here is exactly what I did, what broke, and what I now understand that I did not before.

The Setup: KIND on WSL

Before I could run a single kubectl command, I needed a cluster. I chose KIND because it runs Kubernetes entirely inside Docker containers on your local machine.…