I broke my Kubernetes cluster, and then I found Lima.

jakefurlong — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:58:23 +0000

I took a week off of from work. I had no real plans to do anything. I had time to kill. So I decided to re-take the "Kubernetes for Absolute Beginners" course on KodeKloud. I figured I'd go back to the basics and dive deep on every topic to gain a firmer understanding of the foundational concepts. It was a wonderful experience and I really learned a lot.

Then I got to the appendix.

At first glance it looks like your standard stuff - reference materials, notes, etc. But there was an entire guide on bootstrapping a cluster with kubeadm on a macOS using Multipass. I got me a drink from Dutch Bros and a light snack. I was ready to go. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A simple tutorial that should have taken an hour or less turned in to an entire day of troubleshooting and reading which bled into a second day of starting from scratch. The tutorial was outdated, the startup and install scripts partially worked and left my setup in some weird unknown state. By the end, I was able to power through and get the cluster set up on Multipass with a Calico CNI. It was awful, but honestly, it was exactly what I was looking for. Once of my favorite things to do is to find older books or tutorials and try to follow them in modern day to see what has changed. This affords me the opportunity to start with a broken system and build/fix my way out.

So I wake up the next day, feeling accomplished. I start my Multipass instances only to find that they won't start. I struggle with Multipass for an hour. I read through forums, documentation, ask my good friend ChatGippity and all to no avail. I decided to ditch Multipass. Removing a Calico CNI is a very interesting experience and Multipass is not ready for prime time. So away I go, adventuring to find an alternative. I wanted to see what's out there. We've all used VirtualBox and/or VMware Workstation. I needed something lightweight. I looked at several options and landed on Lima. It really does just work. It's so fast and super light weight. The documentation is pretty good. I have a few recommendations, but I enjoyed using it so much that I actually joined the Lima Slack channel and asked some questions. I opened an issue and commented on an existing issue. It was a great experience. And I had no idea is was a CNCF project!

In the end, I created a Github repo to walk through bootstrapping a cluster with kubeadm on macOS on Lima. I did this without all of their quality of life features. Bare bones, vanilla VM. But they have a turn-key solution if you're looking for one. I highly recommend everyone check them out.

https://lima-vm.io/

And if you wanna check out my repo, you can find it below.

https://github.com/jakefurlong/k8s-kubeadm-lima-macos

DEV Community: jakefurlong

I broke my Kubernetes cluster, and then I found Lima.