Local Kubernetes — The One Above All
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Introduction
Kubernetes is among the most popular open-source project to have ever existed.
Since its release on 7th of June 2014, it has experienced world wide adoption. In fact, the latest survey from CNCF reports that a crushing 96% of the audience is either using or evaluating Kubernetes, along with a staggering 5.6 Million, with a capital M, developers using the platform.
It goes without saying that such broad adoption has brought along plenty of tools to not only test your own workloads locally, but also to develop features and/or extensions on top of the Kubernetes platform itself.
In this article, we will be exploring and comparing most of the more common solutions to run Kubernetes locally for test/development.
Local Kubernetes Environments — Meet the Competition
Today we will be taking a look at the following local Kubernetes Environments, in an all out brawl for supremacy over the local development tool!
kind vs k3d vs minikube vs Docker Desktop vs Rancher Desktop
May the best tool win!
kind (Kubernetes-IN-Docker)
kind is an open-source command line utility that allows users to bootstrap local Kubernetes clusters. Each Kubernetes node, master or worker, is bootstrapped as a docker container.
kind tries to reuse much of the same automation as found in other traditional tools like kudeadm when bootstrapping itself. It was initially designed for testing and local development but some common use cases also include running in CI systems as part of a more streamlined delivery lifecycle.
It is a fairly light weight implementation, with plenty of features and a focus on automation for any new feature added.