Creating a Kubernetes Cluster with Minikube

Objective

minikube is a tool that allows you to run Kubernetes locally. It creates a single-node or multi-node Kubernetes cluster inside a Virtual Machine (VM) on your local machine. The goal of this lab is to guide you in starting a local Kubernetes cluster using minikube and then creating a new namespace. This lays the groundwork for subsequent lab exercises.

Initial Setup

Navigate to the root directory of the python-fastapi-demo-docker project where your environment variables are sourced:

cd ~/environment/python-fastapi-demo-docker

1. Starting Minikube

Before we can deploy applications to Kubernetes, we need to have a running Kubernetes cluster. minikube allows us to create a local Kubernetes cluster, which is suitable for development and testing.

To start your minikube cluster, run the following command in your terminal:

minikube start

The expected output should look like this:

🏄  Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

2. Create a Namespace

Namespaces in Kubernetes serve as a mechanism for dividing cluster resources between multiple users, applications, or environments. Creating separate namespaces for different applications or environments (e.g., development, staging, production) is a common practice. In our case, we are creating a namespace named my-cool-app to hold all the resources related to our application.

To create the "my-cool-app" namespace, use the following command:

kubectl create namespace my-cool-app

The expected output should look like this:

namespace/my-cool-app created

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we've introduced you to the basics of setting up a local Kubernetes development environment using minikube and the concept of Kubernetes namespaces.