This guide is for people who want to craft a custom Kubernetes cluster. If you can find an existing Getting Started Guide that meets your needs on this list, then we recommend using it, as you will be able to benefit from the experience of others. However, if you have specific IaaS, networking, configuration management, or operating system requirements not met by any of those guides, then this guide will provide an outline of the steps you need to take. Note that it requires considerably more effort than using one of the pre-defined guides.

This guide is also useful for those wanting to understand at a high level some of the steps that existing cluster setup scripts are making.