It would be very hard to find a more fitting name for Minikube – the endless possibilities of Kubernetes have been stripped down to the bare minimum so that the tool can run on a laptop or PC. Yet you needn’t worry about functionality. All the key features are here, and with just a few installation commands, Minikube becomes a fully functional Kubernetes cluster that’s perfect for everyday development tasks or playing around.
Minikube can run the virtual machine via a number of different hypervisors, for example VirtualBox, which we mentioned above. If you already have a hypervisor installed on your system, Minikube will automatically set up the virtual machine. Last but not least, to send commands to your Kubernetes cluster, you’ll need the standard command line interface, kubectl.
Once these components are installed, Minikube is ready to go. By default, the virtual machine will be allocated 1 GB of RAM, and a Kubernetes cluster will be created, ready for you to configure using kubectl. One of the first things you might want to do is adjust the memory allocation to suit your requirements.
If you’ve worked with containers before, the next steps will be familiar. The physical cluster is divided into multiple areas using namespaces. Creating specific namespaces via kubectl can help you maintain a clear overview of your resources. As you can see, thanks to the various add-ons, Minikube offers just as many functions as any other container system.