You may have received a promo code when you attended a conference, meetup, or hackathon, but you have no experience with IBM Cloud yet, and you want to access the free Kubernetes cluster in the IBM Cloud as soon as possible, because you can use the cluster for your own “playing” and “testing”.

In this situation you can educate yourself with the badge IBM Cloud Essentials related to IBM Cloud before you access the IBM Cloud. BTW, this way would be the best choice ;-). With IBM Cloud Essentials  you have free education and an official badge.

Or you can enter your promo code and create a Kubernetes Cluster directly.
I created a short youtube video related to this fastpass :

• How to enter a promo code?
• How to instantiate a free Kubernetes Cluster ?

If you don’t want to watch the video, these are the simple steps you have follow:

Register:

• Register yourself on IBM Cloud with the link you got on your promo code or register here on IBM Cloud  https://console.bluemix.net/registration/

Insert promo code:

• Select “Manage->Billing” in the menu on the IBM Cloud WebUI
• Insert your promo code

Create free Kubernetes Cluster:

• Select the Kubernetes service from the catalog and press create
• Choose the data center location, these indicate where the cluster will be instantiated
• Select free cluster
• Press create
• Follow the instructions in the “Access” tab, to access your cluster with kubectl from your local pc.

I hope this was useful for you and let’s see what’s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

PS: By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.