Is it suffice to use minikube for lab exercises instead of GKE/AWS k8s clusters?

anukul.mohil

Since minikube is not mentioned in lab environment here, I was wondering if I'll run in to any issue finishing any of the lab exercises in future chapters if I have a local minikube cluster instead of a GKE/AWS k8s clusters mentioned.
AFAIK, minikube was not preferred earlier because it lacked support for multinode clusters but since it is now supported was wondering if running a minikube multinode cluster would suffice.

I'd want to use minikube since it's very trivial to set it up in comparison to setting up k8s clusters on GKE/AWS.

Any help is appreciated
Thanks.

anukul.mohil

thanks for the information @chrispokorni
Would lab courses work fine with GKE instead of GCE which would give us production type environment and should be easier to setup than a new k8s cluster in GCE?

chrispokorni

Hi @anukul.mohil,

I would like to invite you to explore Lab exercise 2.2 - Deploy a New Cluster. You may quickly come to realize that with the help of the scripts provided in the course resources, bootstrapping the cluster will be as simple as running two separate scripts (one on each GCE VM instance), followed by a handful of commands that join together the two nodes of the cluster and configure the control plane node. All in all, an extremely trivial process.

Regards,
-Chris

chrispokorni

Hi @anukul.mohil,

The course presents exercises in an environment that resembles a production setting, therefore suggesting GCP GCE, AWS EC2, or local VM instances in conjunction with production cluster bootstrapping tools. Minikube's support of multi-node clusters is very recent, and it is presented as a development and learning tool which has not been tested against the lab exercises of this course. If Minikube is the tool of your choice, while it may work for labs, keep in mind that some steps from the lab guide may need to be modified to work with your setting - installation scripts, service exposure and access, etc. As a result, exercises may produce inconsistent results and outputs with the ones presented in the lab guide.

Regards,
-Chris

anukul.mohil

Hi @chrispokorni,
I had some issues with virtualbox, but deploying a cluster on GCE worked perfectly.
Thanks a lot for the help.