Kubernetes and Linux on your Windows
Jaana Monto
IT Surgeon in VDI | Bridge between Customers and IT | Digital Employee Experience Expert
I stumbled upon free training: https://www.rancher.academy/. Today I want to write (briefly!) about running Kubernetes and Linux on your Windows machine. That is possible via Rancher Desktop: https://rancherdesktop.io/. Rancher desktop installation is pretty straight forward and all you need to remember is that you need to enable virtualization in BIOS (https://aka.ms/enablevirtualization).
Rancher Academy has training on YAML basics, Kubernetes Basics, K3s Basics, NeuVector Basics, Longhorn Basics, RKE2 Basics, Container Basics and Rancher Basics. I dove in to Kubernetes basics and in that material they will instruct you to install Rancher Desktop on your machine. Material was good and they had clear instructions on labs.
Rancher desktop installs also WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/. With WSL you can run Linux on your Windows desktop so that's pretty cool. I personally have always had a soft spot for Debian distro so I had to install that right away:
You can access the installed distros via Windows Explorer:
There are basic commands for WSL that can get you started : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/basic-commands
With WSL and Rancher Desktop you can conveniently run containers and Linux on your desktop and you have the freedom to experiment on your dedicated environment.