Is Minikube’s Profile a Kubernetes Cluster?
I discuss the sparsely documented bridging concept that causes Minikube to behave like Kubernetes.
I avoid going deeply into why and how to use or Kubernetes or Minikube. Instead, I focus on how Minikube’s Profile enables training on your local system for Kubernetes on the cloud.
What is Kubernetes?
When Kubernetes was conceptualized, it was started as a Cloud Distributed Operating System (CDOS) for microservices. A “pure” cloud of microservices where complex applications are composed of small independent processes which communicate with each other through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) over a network.
After all, a cloud is a myriad of heterogeneous hardware, each with its operating systems (bare-metal), that hosts your microservices, which you want to replicate (scale) and start up again if the microservice fails (fault tolerance).
Kubernetes orchestrates the cloud services, starting up and initializing clusters, restarting pods if they become unreachable, replicating (scaling) pods, and many other distributed operating system actions.
Kubernetes introduces its specific definitions of clusters, pods, containers, and services. However, we don’t need to define them or understand Kubernetes clusters to use them in the same manner as Minikube clusters.
What is Minikube?
Minikube is a popular method to train with or test Kubernetes on your local workstation(s).
Minikube is how you run look-and-feel-like Kubernetes on your local computer(s).
I think of Minikube as a program that I install on my local machine(s) for training with or testing Kubernetes.
We use Minikube on our local sandboxes before we push a Kubernetes configuration out to the cloud.
As does Kubernetes, Minikube uses the client command-line tool kubectl. However, Minikube requires a separate command-line tool called minikube.
I focus on Minikube’s Profile and Kubectl’s Context. I detail how we use both to orchestrate the same cluster deployment on either Minikube or Kubernetes.
