Do you remember that ‘chocolate in my peanut butter, peanut butter in my
chocolate’ advertisement? Well that’s the difference between kind and
minikube. In a very simplified way, Minikube is a virtual machine with
a container engine inside of it, while Kind is a container engine with
‘machine’ images inside of it.
Which should you use?
Both are amazing tools, but the Kubernetes project and CNCF have officially backed Minikube as best for learning and working locally with Kubernetes on your own workstation.
Kind was and is used by test Kubernetes itself. It’s an amazing, simple tool, but it lacks many things that are required to get a true sense of working with a Kubernetes cluster.
For all intents and purposes, Minikube is a fully separate network of computers encapsulating a Kubernetes installation in exactly the same way you would encounter if working with one in the enterprise or on your own home multi-node lab. What feels like an inconvenience, mounting directories into it, for example, is actually exactly what you want for a beginner experience. It is the same.
Minikube is also designed for beginners and installs easily on Mac,
Windows (WSL2 isn’t even required) or Linux. No need to install Docker
or anything else. Just a single thing and you get docker, kubectl
and everything else for free (which is literal as well since Docker
Desktop costs money if you are doing it for work).
💬 I really did not get the value of Minikube when I started because many people told me to use Kind. I now regret that decision and wish I had learned on Minikube instead for reasons I talk about in many places in my notes.
#k8s #minikube #kind #docker #cncf #cloud #tips #tools