Using Minikube on EC2 for this kind of tutorial is a common starting point, though one alternative worth knowing: for learners who want closer parity with production cluster behavior, k3s on a single EC2 instance runs a real Kubernetes control plane with lower resource overhead than Minikube and does not require VirtualBox. The Ingress setup with k3s also ships with Traefik by default, which gives you a working HTTPS termination path with cert-manager without additional tooling.