...The purpose is educational: by doing each step manually, you gain deep insight into how Kubernetes works under the hood—control plane components, kube-configs, networking, encryption, etc. The guide isn’t meant for production use; rather it’s a learning tool to build foundational understanding before using higher-level platforms. You’ll learn about certificate management, API server flags, etcd clustering, kubelet boot sequence, and how pods route traffic across nodes. Many practitioners use it to prep for Kubernetes certifications or deeply understand Kubernetes internals.