Real Kubernetes on your laptop in the time it takes to brew a coffee — and you can throw it away and recreate it for free.
Part five of the series is the practical payoff for all the earlier concepts: we spin up a real k3d cluster with a single command. Not an emulation — an honest Kubernetes API (k3s under the hood) that starts in seconds and sips memory, because instead of etcd it defaults to an embedded SQLite — basically just a file. Recreating a cluster from scratch is routine, not scary.
The final command we'll carry through the rest of the series:
k3d cluster create dev --servers 1 --agents 2 --registry-create k3d-registry.localhost:5000 -p "8081:80@loadbalancer" — with a built-in registry (that's the cure for the ImagePullBackOff from chapter one) and a forwarded port. I break down the flags, kubectl contexts (heads up: the context is named k3d-dev, not dev — a classic gotcha), port forwarding via serverlb/Traefik, and the main trap: ports are fixed at cluster creation time and can't be added on the fly — but recreating in k3d costs peanuts.
And honestly: when to reach for kind or minikube instead of k3d. https://dorokhovich.com/blog/local-k8s-cluster-with-k3d?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=local-k8s-cluster-with-k3d
Top comments (0)