The first and arguably most important step when choosing a cluster is to pick the right hosted platform for your Kubernetes cluster. At a high level, here are the choices you have:

• Local solutions include the following:
  • Minikube: A single-node Kubernetes cluster
  • Ubuntu on LXD: This uses LXD to deploy a nine-instance cluster of Kubernetes
  • IBM's Cloud Private-CE: This uses VirtualBox to deploy Kubernetes on n+1 instances
  • kubeadm-dind (Docker-in-Docker): This allows for multi-node Kubernetes clusters
• Hosted solutions include the following:
  • Google Kubernetes Engine
  • Amazon Elastic Container Services
  • Azure Kubernetes Service
  • Stackpoint
  • Openshift online
  • IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services
  • Giant Swarm
• On all of the aforementioned clouds and more, there are many turnkey solutions that allow you to spin up full clusters with community-maintained scripts

As of this book's publishing, here's a list of projects and solutions: