Being a cloud-based environment, the IBM Cloud has no prerequisites to worry about, which makes getting it up and running pretty easy. All you really need is a web browser (see the documentation for the recommended versions) and a reasonable internet connection. 

Optional, but recommended, is the IBM Cloud Developer Toolset. IBM touts this as a unified way to interact with your applications, containers, infrastructures, and other services. In this installation, you get the standalone IBM Cloud command-line interface (CLI), plus various tools such as Git, Docker, Helm, kubectl, and curl, as well as the following IBM Cloud plugins: 

• IBM Cloud Developer Tools plugin 
• IBM Cloud Functions plugin 
• IBM Cloud Container Registry plugin 
• IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service plugin 
• The sdk-gen plugin