= Guide Overview

The purpose of this guide is to walk through the steps that need to be completed prior to booting up the
Keycloak server for the first time.  If you just want to test drive Keycloak, it pretty much runs out of the box with its
own embedded and local-only database.  For
 actual deployments that are going to be run in production you'll need to decide how you want to manage server configuration
 at runtime (standalone or domain mode), configure a shared database you will use for Keycloak, set up encryption and HTTPS,
 and finally set up Keycloak to run in a cluster.  This guide walks through each and every aspect of any pre-boot
 decisions and setup you must do prior to deploying Keycloak.