When to Write a Custom Exporter#

The Prometheus ecosystem has exporters for most infrastructure components: node_exporter for Linux hosts, kube-state-metrics for Kubernetes objects, mysqld_exporter for MySQL, and hundreds more. You write a custom exporter when your application or service does not have a Prometheus endpoint, you need business metrics that no generic exporter can provide (revenue, signups, queue depth), or you need to adapt a non-Prometheus system that exposes metrics in a proprietary format.

The Core Principle#

Zero trust networking operates on a simple premise: no network location is inherently trusted. Being inside the corporate network, inside a VPC, or inside a Kubernetes cluster does not grant access to anything. Every request must be authenticated, authorized, and encrypted regardless of where it originates.

This is a departure from the traditional castle-and-moat model where a VPN places you “inside” the network and everything inside is implicitly trusted. That model fails because attackers who breach the perimeter have unrestricted lateral movement. Zero trust eliminates the concept of inside versus outside.

Minikube Add-ons for Production-Like Environments#

A bare minikube cluster runs workloads but lacks the infrastructure that production clusters rely on – metrics collection, ingress routing, TLS, monitoring, and load balancer support. Minikube’s addon system bridges this gap with one-command installs of production components.

Surveying Available Add-ons#

List everything minikube offers:

minikube addons list

This prints dozens of addons with their status. Most are disabled by default. The ones worth enabling depend on what you are testing, but a production-like setup typically needs five to seven of them.

Minikube Storage: PersistentVolumes, StorageClasses, and Data Persistence#

Minikube ships with a built-in storage provisioner that handles PersistentVolumeClaims automatically. Understanding how it works – and where it differs from production storage – is essential for testing stateful workloads locally.

Default Storage: The hostPath Provisioner#

When you start minikube, it registers a default StorageClass called standard backed by the k8s.io/minikube-hostpath provisioner. This provisioner creates PersistentVolumes as directories on the minikube node’s filesystem.

Multi-Cluster Emulation with Minikube Profiles#

Production infrastructure rarely runs on a single cluster. You have staging, production, maybe a dedicated cluster for CI or data workloads. Minikube profiles let you run multiple independent Kubernetes clusters on one machine, each with its own version, resources, and addons. This is how you test multi-cluster workflows without cloud accounts.

What Profiles Are#

A minikube profile is a fully independent cluster. Each profile has its own:

Using Minikube for CI, Integration Testing, and Local Development Workflows#

Minikube gives you a real Kubernetes cluster wherever you need one – on a developer laptop, in a GitHub Actions runner, or in any CI environment that has Docker. The patterns differ between local development and CI, but the underlying approach is the same: stand up a cluster, deploy your workload and its dependencies, test against it, tear it down.