kubernetes-the-hard-way VS kubespray

Yes. To be clear the series is actually called "Install Kubernetes from Scratch" on YouTube, but on GitHub it's called Kubernetes The Hard Way On VirtualBox (since it's a fork of kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way but uses Vagrant + VirtualBox instead of GCP).

P.S. Before using my repository, I strongly recommend that those who have never deployed "Kubernetes The Hard Way” give it a try to better understand how Kubernetes works. You won't regret it.

You can refer to this: https://github.com/mmumshad/kubernetes-the-hard-way

When it came to deployment, I had several options, and I chose the hard way: deploying Kubernetes on bare metal nodes using KubeSpray. Troubleshooting bare metal Kubernetes deployments honed my skills in pinpointing issues. This hands-on experience provided a deep understanding of how each component, like the Control Plane, kubelet, Container Runtime, and scheduler, interacts to orchestrate containers.

Worth noting that if you like ansible, Kubespray has had documented air-gap installation since 2018 https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/commit/963c3479...

calico v3.7.3 kubernetes v1.16.0 installed via kubespray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

About 1yr ago I ran k8s with 300 nodes using kube spray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray . Never had any real issue with it. We did finally move to the cloud though.

I would highly recommend https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

We build our own distro called Compliant Kubernetes, and we use (a fork of) kubespray to install the base Kubernetes layer. Our distro is entirely open source, so you can use it as a reference, if you want.

If you want to run Kubernetes on VM's you can look into kubespray and play around with the options for installing and checking the configuration after the fact.