Using Minikube to experiment with kubernetes and continous delivery

 

Minikube is the way to go for learning kubernetes in your time. It can help you learn the Kubernetes nuts and bolts apart from helping you learn cloud native application design implementation using tools like Skaffold, which helps in continous development and delivery of cloud native software features. So, before spawning a minikube custom cluster make sure you have one of the drivers installed in your linux workstation. We use docker driver here. If you want to follow along, make sure docker is installed and your user id has the docker group added to it.

Apart from minikube, you will make use of kubectl command.

Launch a custom kubernetes cluster in minikube,

$ minikube start -p custom --driver docker

 

If all went well you would see 14 containers running in 7 pods of kube-system namespace of the custom cluster, just launched by minikube as result of above output.

Use following commands to check the above,

$ docker container ps -a

$ docker container ls –quiet | wc -l

$ kubectl get namespace

$ kubectl get pods -n kube-system

In the background it made use of following docker images to give rise to pods/containers required by the kubernetes cluster namespaces.

$ docker image ls

Now we will make use of this local cluster to make our developer project and promote it through the lifecycle of dev , test, prod cluster landscape using skaffold. For more on the skaffold usage, check our blog on continuous delivery using skaffold for local development.