What is Minikube and Kubectl? 🤔 Setup a Minikube cluster for Kubernetes Beginners

Usually in a production cluster setup you will have multiple master and worker nodes on separate machines. 💪🏼

But what if you want to test something on your local machine or try something out? Setting up the whole cluster would be difficult or even impossible. 🤨

For that use case you can use minikube: a ONE Node cluster, where the master and worker processes are on the same machine.

Kubectl, the command line tool for Kubernetes, then enables the interaction with the cluster: to create pods, services and other components.

In the below video I’ll explain everything in more detail with animations and show a demo of installing these components and start the minikube cluster.

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Comments

[Jashua]

Hey Nana, sorry for bothering once again!

I finished your series, well specifically till the video "Docker vs Kubernetes vs Swarm" (since the recent videos are about Kubernetes and I'm not there yet)

Thank you for the videos, we are going to implement Docker in our little workflow this month, and hopefully Jenkins in a couple months down the road, to speed things up without worrying about compatibility issues :)

I briefly understand the concept of Swarm / Kubernetes to orchestrate multiple containers, so from that point of view those tools seem to be aimed towards big applications, is that right?

Since we are deploying web applications to local servers, I could simply deploy them with docker-compose by using the restart flag and that's about it

Could small applications take advantage of Swarm / Kubernetes?

[TechWorld with Nana]

Hi Jashua,

I'm glad my videos helped you with your project. Using docker-compose for a small project is a good idea. To your question, I suggest not to use Kubernetes or other orchestration tool for small applications, simply because of the setup overhead to benefits ratio.

If your application grows a bit more complex or you need a very high availability for your app, you could use Docker swarm, which is more lightweight than k8s or you can also use some Kubernetes as a service platform, but again here you must consider: price/benefits ratio.

Hope this answers your question :)

Regards