Why Production Parity Matters Locally#

The most expensive bugs are the ones you find after deploying to production. A minikube cluster with default settings lacks ingress, metrics, and resource enforcement – so your app works locally and breaks in staging. The goal is to configure minikube so that anything that works on it has a high probability of working on a real cluster.

Choosing Your Local Kubernetes Tool#

Before configuring minikube, decide if it is the right tool.

Managed Kubernetes vs Self-Managed#

The fundamental tradeoff is straightforward: managed Kubernetes trades control for reduced operational burden, while self-managed Kubernetes gives you full control at the cost of owning everything – etcd, certificates, upgrades, high availability, and recovery.

This decision has cascading effects on team structure, hiring, on-call burden, and long-term maintenance cost. Choose deliberately.

Managed Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE)#

The cloud provider runs the control plane: API server, etcd, controller manager, scheduler. They handle patching, scaling, and high availability for these components. You manage worker nodes and workloads.