If you are familiar with configuration management, such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible, kubespray (https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kubespray) is the best choice to set up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch. It provides the Ansible playbook that supports the majority of Linux distributions and public clouds, such as AWS and GCP.

Ansible (https://www.ansible.com) is a Python-based SSH automation tool that can configure Linux as your desired state based on the configuration, which is called playbook. This cookbook describes how to use kubespray to set up Kubernetes on Linux.