It is recommended that you have a fundamental knowledge of Linux containers and Kubernetes in general. For preparing your Kubernetes clusters, using a Linux host is recommended. If your workstation is Windows-based, then we recommend that you use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL gives you a Linux command line on Windows and lets you run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows.

It's always good practice to develop using the same environment (which means the same distribution and the same version) as the one that will be used in production. This will avoid unexpected surprises such as It Worked on My Machine (IWOMM). If your workstation is using a different OS, another good approach is to set up a virtual machine on your workstation. VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) is a free and open source hypervisor that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

In this chapter, we'll assume that you are using an Ubuntu host (18.04, code name Bionic Beaver at the time of writing). There are no specific hardware requirements since all the recipes in this chapter will be deployed and run on cloud instances. Here is the list of software packages that will be required on your localhost to complete the recipes:

• cURL
• Python
• Vim or Nano (or your favorite text editor)