I am new to the world containers, docker, kubernetes and I am investigating requirements for implementing a my middleware distributed project. I took some key container courses with Docker and Kubernetes. But I would like to ask for those who have more experience, in a production environment (or just execution and instantiation of modules, where each module would be a container) what would be the dependencies to execute a container?

Is it mandatory for me to have the dependency package for docker and docker itself installed for this? To just raise the pods and services with Kubernetes is it also mandatory to have kubectl installed on my host?

Note: For local development and deployment using google cloud I have already done some testing and I know it is necessary.