Run Kubernetes On Your Machine

Several options to start playing with K8s in no time

It’s really easy to get a Kubernetes cluster online as almost each cloud provider offers its own solution (Google GKE, Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, DigitalOcean DOKS, Civo Kubernetes, …). As sometimes we just want to play locally this post lists some of the main options available for this usage.

Quick notes

To access a Kubernetes cluster from our local machine we first need to install and configure kubectl, the command line tool used to send request to the cluster’s API Server. The installation is very simple (a binary to download and to add in the PATH), we will see in the examples how to configure kubectl to target a specific cluster.

Also, several solutions are running within a virtual machine and thus need an hypervisor. In several examples we will use Multipass, a great tool which allows to spin up Ubuntu VMs on Mac, Linux, or Windows workstation. Depending upon your OS, it uses Hyper-V, HyperKit, KVM, or VirtualBox natively for the fastest startup time.

Minikube is probably the most known solution, it starts a virtual machine and runs all the Kubernetes’ processes inside of it. Minikube used to run with VirtualBox by default, but it can now selects the best driver available on the system.