Is there a low cost way to learn real K8s, after exhausting minikube?

Question

Ive messed around with Minikube, but now I want to implement the real deal. I want to implement a docker registry, blue green deployents, monitoring, request tracing, log aggregation, etc, but all for my own learning.When I looked at pricing out Azure/AWS, it was like $200 a month for a 4 node cluster.So HN, if you had to learn K8s on your own, what would you do after minikube?Also, am I just being dumb? Can I just use minikube to learn all this? At some point I feel like having real nodes with real networks and control planes is better learning.

yeldarb · Accepted Answer

Is $200/mo really a huge barrier? That's about the equivalent of 1 college credit at a local University & you'll probably learn a ton more.

jareds · Answer

Take a look at the Oracle cloud free tear. YOU can create up to four arm based vm's with 6 gigs of ram and one cpu per vm. If you go this route try and do research on what regions have the most capacity. I picked Chicago and had a really hard time getting instances to launch do to high demand. I upgraded to a pay as you go account so still get the vm's for free but get higher priority when crating new instances and have had no more issues launching instances.

ph4te · Answer

You can buy a &ldquo;lot of computers&rdquo; on eBay for cheap, setup k3s on them. You don&rsquo;t need a lot of horsepower to play with all of those things locally. Here is an example.https://www.ebay.com/itm/204446735467