hi, hope you are enjoying your kubernetes Journey !
First off, you I wanna tell you that you can use whichever you want between the container runtime you want to install.
You can use docker if you are not familiar with the others but containerd is in my opinion the best lightweight alternative ( containerd is used in docker, but for kubernetes you don't need all the layers that docker provides only the container runtime Itself, here containerd ) you can read this for more info, but there is plenty of documentation about this.: https://www.tutorialworks.com/difference-docker-containerd-runc-crio-oci/
Second of all, I don't know how you are trying to install your kubernetes cluster but again there is few couples of way to do it:
The hardest but very instructive can be kubernetes the hard way ( https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way )
Next you can use kubeadm (again there is plenty of documentation on the internet but you can follow one of the kubeadm tutorials: https://devopscube.com/setup-kubernetes-cluster-kubeadm/ )
Here is a list of tools that you can use to install your kubernetes cluster, you can look for tutorials for each of them on the internet: https://dzone.com/articles/50-useful-kubernetes-tools )
Last but not least, since you are on aws, you can use the AWS EKS service to setup quickly a robust kubernetes cluster. (https://aws.amazon.com/fr/eks/)
This is for AWS. If you want a local k8s cluster I strongly suggest you to use kind (kubernetes in docker)
Bguess
