Minikube Lab

Production-Ready K8s Locally

Bringing Production Power to Your Laptop

Testing Kubernetes shouldn’t always require a cloud provider and a credit card. This lab is designed to bridge the gap between basic local development and production-grade architecture by utilizing multi-node setups.

What’s Inside

This lab mimics real-world cluster behavior. Instead of a standard single-node setup, we deploy a multi-node cluster. This allows us to experiment with:

  • Node Affinity & Anti-affinity: Control which nodes your pods land on.
  • High Availability: See what happens when one node “fails.”
  • Load Balancing: Distribute traffic across multiple instances.

Why Minikube?

Minikube is the industry standard for local K8s for several reasons:

  • Safe Break-Fix: Intentionally crash components to learn how Kubernetes self-heals.
  • API Consistency: It uses the same Kubernetes APIs found in EKS, GKE, or AKS.
  • GitOps Ready: The perfect environment to test ArgoCD or Flux pipelines locally.

🧪 Lab Environment:

  • Driver: Docker
  • K8s Version: v1.29+
  • OS: macOS

Setup Guide

1. Install the Tools

If you are on macOS, use Homebrew. For other OSs, visit the official Docker and Minikube download pages.

brew install minikube
brew install docker

2. Start Docker

Ensure your Docker engine is active before proceeding:

open -a docker

3. Provision the Cluster

We will launch a cluster named shivam-k8s with two nodes. This creates a Control Plane and a Worker node.

minikube start --nodes=2 -p shivam-k8s

4. Deploy a Test Workload

K8s Imperative commands to create Deployment and Service:

kubectl create deploy shivam-deploy --image=vimal13/apache-webserver-php --replicas=2 
kubectl expose deploy shivam-deploy --type=NodePort --port=8080 --target-port=80

5. Expose and Access

Minikube makes it easy to access your NodePort service without complex networking rules:

minikube service shivam-deploy url -p shivam-k8s

This command will output a URL. Copy and paste it into your browser to see the landing page live!

6. Clean Up

When you’re finished with your lab, you can stop or delete the cluster to save system resources: Bash

To pause the lab

minikube stop -p shivam-k8s

To delete everything

minikube delete -p shivam-k8s
Last modified January 16, 2026: add robots.txt file (c4e96e4)