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TechWorld with Nana
TechWorld with Nana

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Kubectl | Minikube | Kops - What's the difference? πŸ€”

In Kubernetes world almost every tool has a β€œkube” in its name, plus there are so any of them each having a different role, so it may get a little confusing. The difference between 3 of the widely used tools - Kubectl | Minikube | Kops is actually pretty straightforward.

Kops
Is used to create and manage a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on cloud. It’s integrated with AWS and Google Cloud (GCE) and some other platforms. It’s a command line tool that offers simple commands to create, update and delete the cluster on cloud environment. These are some of Kops commands:

kops create cluster --name mycluster.k8s.local
kops update cluster mycluster.k8s.local
kops delete cluster mycluster.k8s.local
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Minikube
Is used for the same purpose as Kops, but for LOCAL k8s cluster creation. So with Minikube you can create, update, delete a cluster locally on your machine. It creates a single node cluster in VM on your local machine. It’s useful if you want to quickly create a small test cluster. It uses pretty simple commands to create and delete local cluster:

minikube start
minikube stop
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Kubectl
Once you create the cluster (either locally with Minikube or remotely in prod mode with kops), you need kubectl to actually configure it: create k8s components like pods and services etc, troubleshoot the cluster etc. Here are some common kubectl commands:

kubectl create -f deployment.yml
kubectl get pods
kubectl describe pod pod-name
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You can find a diagram comparing the 3 tools here:
Diagram - scroll to the end of the article


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Top comments (3)

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lboix profile image
Lucien Boix

You did a good recap :)

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techworld_with_nana profile image
TechWorld with Nana

Thanks Lucien! :)

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rishikeshk07 profile image
RISHIKESHk07

wait a doubt how does minikube and something like layer5/meshery differ ?