How minikube works?

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While playing around with Docker and orchestration (kubernetes) I had to install and use minikube to create a simple sandbox environment. At the beginning I thought that minikube installs some kind of VM and run the "minified" kubernetes environment inside the same, however, after the installation listing my local Docker running containers I found minikube running as a container!! .. so here I'm a little bit lost and I have some questions hopefully somebody can clarify.

Does minikube itself works as a Docker container?

minikube kubernetes docker
1 Answers

Just going off of the source code available on Github and my knowledge:

  1. No it's not run in a Docker container (although it does orchestrate launching containers)
  2. It uses Go to launch a smaller footprint version of the Kubernetes API that is compatible with the Kubernetes standard APIs but not ideal for a full cluster
  3. The hierarchy is Minkube Golang runtime -> Docker containers running within mini cluster (where the cluster is an abstract concept which is just a bunch of namespaced Docker containers)
  4. Running on Minikube is not ideal for production performance it is intended as a platform to test applications locally that will eventually run in fully-fledged Kubernetes clusters
  5. The main architecture restrictions would be related to the differences between Minkube running locally and a full Kubernetes cluster running across different nodes so probably a lot of networking and authentication type differences/restrictions
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