If you’re going to learn Kubernetes, it won’t be just by reading. You’ll need to actually have an environment to practice in. By far this has been the biggest hurdle to learning, but these days there are options.
You’re a big baller and can afford to run two small VMs in the cloud. (Not recommended)
You have access to an existing cluster already… something like a QA environment at work? (Not recommended - probably illegal?)
Install and run MiniKube (Highly recommended, but hopefully your machine is powerful enough)
Obviously #2 is out of the question, and #1 can cost some serious moolah if you get it wrong. Even if you don’t, the smallest compute options on some cloud providers are not sufficient to run a control plane.
That’s why #3 is probably the way to go, and even then, you need a fairly powerful machine.
So that being said, here’s a few prerequisites:
Containerization engine (docker or podman) installed
2 or more CPUs
20GB of free disk space
From here, follow the guide on MiniKube installation.
If you’re running Windows, I highly recommend WSL2 and a Linux installation, since docker will likely have tried to install itself using WSL anyways.