“Small is beautiful,” as E. F. Schumacher once said. Kubernetes, a powerful but sprawling container orchestration platform, might benefit from a more stripped-down approach. Not everyone needs the full set of tools and features found in the default Kubernetes distribution.
You may not have the time or technical know-how to customize Kubernetes for more minimalist applications, but there’s a good chance someone else has done it for you. This article looks at three Kubernetes distributions that take Kubernetes back to the basics.
Minikube, an official repackaging of Kubernetes, provides a local instance of Kubernetes small enough to install on a developer’s notebook. The minimum requirements are 2GB of free memory, 2 CPUs, 20GB of storage, and a container or virtual machine (VM) manager such as Docker, Hyper-V, or Parallels. Note that for Mac users there is as yet no M1 build, only x86-64.
