So, you don't have a huge server farm with hundreds of containers, you just run a few docker-instances on a small system and want to orchestrate them with kubernetes? Then baby-kubes is the solution you need. They are the exact opposite of real life babys: They aren't greatly demanding and are easy to take care of. We looked at the baby-kubes K3s, minikube, micro8s and kind comparing them in ease of installation, applicability, configurability and the K8s-versions used. But which one is the best for you and your needs - here is the comparison:

k3s

installation

• docker-compose environment

  wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rancher/k3s/master/docker-compose.yml
  docker-compose up --scale node=2

• sets up 1 server container and 2 node containers in docker

• interaction via kubectl: kubectl --kubeconfig kubeconfig.yaml <cmd>

• removal: //docker-compose stop

specs / general info

• maintained by rancher labs

• optimized for ARM64/ARMv7

• v1.13.5 at the time of review

• certified kubernetes distribution

• no legacy, alpha, non-default features

• no in-tree cloud providers/storage drivers

• docker optional

• sqlite3 as default storage, etcd optional

• automatic tls management

• helm charts support

• files on the k3s server in /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/manifests/ are auto-deployed

• kind: HelmChart installs helm charts from the official hub

• containerd, coredns, flannel

• no support for HA at the moment

review

• easy to install, docker-compose included for easy setup of multiple nodes on one machine
• deployment of helm charts is simple, no messing with helm/tiller, abstracted in backend
• possible to create different clusters based on different docker-compose files

docker membership required, no sudo

minikube

installation

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube

kvm2 driver installation:

sudo apt install libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system qemu-kvm
sudo yum install libvirt-daemon-kvm qemu-kvm
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/docker-machine-driver-kvm2
sudo install docker-machine-driver-kvm2 /usr/local/bin/
./minikube start --vm-driver=kvm2

specs / general info

• maintained by kubernetes
• no ARM support, intel/amd only
• v1.14.0 at the time of review
• supports several container runtimes: docker, containerd, cri-o, rkt
• minikube dashboard to launch informational dashboard locally
• helm not on board, but can easily be installed
• a collection of addons is included by default and can be enabled via minikube (efk, registry, ...)
• storage drivers are included
• requirements: 2cpu, 2gb ram, 20gb hdd

review

• easy to install, but due to the use of kvm there are more dependencies than just docker
• several clusters can be created (in different KVM instances)
• libvirt membership required, no sudo

microk8s

installation

sudo snap install microk8s --classic
sudo microk8s.start

specs / general info

• maintained by canonical
• snap-based
• addons can be enabled via microk8s.enable (istio, jaeger, dashboard, ...)
• k8s v1.14.0 at time of review
• support for ARM architecture

review

• only one cluster can be created
• sudo required to install snap
• bit more bare-bones in usage (own cmds, run everything as sudo or root, ...)
• config files are outside of containers/vms, on the node itself, not nested inside

kind (Kubernetes IN Docker)

installation

go get -u sigs.k8s.io/kind && kind create cluster
export KUBECONFIG="$(~/go/bin/kind get kubeconfig-path --name="kind")"

specs / general info

• part of CNCF special interest group
• can be configured with config file to create several master and worker nodes
• k8s v1.13.4 at the time of review
• can be supplied with custom base and node images that can contain custom tooling and dependencies
• uses kubeadm inside the nodes to bootstrap
• no ARM support yet

review

• several clusters can be created in different docker containers (per flag in binary)
• no onboard goodies like dashboard etc.
• currently in version 0.3.0-alpha, supposed to reach 1.0.0 with k8s 1.14
• active development, project started end of november 2018
• used by kubernetes for test environment (kubetest)
• abstracts kubeadm usage, provides full-featured k8s