Make sure you have installed kops and installed kubectl, and installed the gcloud tools. You’ll need a Google Cloud account, and make sure that gcloud is logged in to your account using gcloud init.
kops uses DNS for discovery, both inside the cluster and so that you can reach the kubernetes API server from clients. kops has a strong opinion on the cluster name: it should be a valid DNS name. By doing so you will no longer get your clusters confused, you can share clusters with your colleagues unambiguously, and you can reach them without relying on remembering an IP address. This step is easy to mess up (it is the #1 cause of problems!) You can double-check that your cluster is configured correctly if you have the dig tool by running:
dig yourclusterfqdn
kops needs a state store, to hold the configuration for your clusters. The simplest configuration for Google Cloud is to store it in a Google Cloud Storage bucket in the same account, so that’s how we’ll start.
So, just create an empty bucket - you can use any (available) name - e.g.
gsutil mb gs://kubernetes-clusters/