A node is either a virtual machine or a physical computer running the Linux operating system that participates in your Kubernetes cluster.

The installation process described assumes that each node is running Ubuntu 20 LTS. Each of the three nodes must have identical computing resource (cpu/memory/disk) and configuration (filesystem layout, OS version, patch level, installed software packages, security setting, etc).

All nodes in your deployment must be accessible via SSH to the host computer being used to configure them, so SSH must be installed as an operating system component when installing Ubuntu 20 LTS.