I personally like learning this way. Have a single server with at least 20 physical cores available. Use qemu to create VMs. Personally, had nixOS (minimal) in

I personally like learning this way. Have a single server with at least 20 physical cores available. Use qemu to create VMs. Personally, had nixOS (minimal) installed on the VMs. Scripted the setup (live cd created with my ssh key so I can remotely setup the VM such as disk partitioning). Then had a nix configuration to setup environment. A bit of a learning curve but the benefit here is repeatable environments. Was even able to learn more about k8s using a small mini cluster. Host machine was the controller node while VMs were nodes. By injecting latency between nodes to distance between different data center regions (ie, us-east vs us-west), actually able to reproduce some distributed app issues. All of this while not having to give up $$$ to the major server resellers (or "cloud" providers). No worries about forgetting to tear down the cluster and receiving a surprise bill at the end of the month.