February 22, 2026
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.
Before configuring minikube, decide if it is the right tool.
February 22, 2026
Monitoring on minikube serves two purposes. First, it catches resource problems early – your app might work in tests but OOM-kill under load, and you will not know without metrics. Second, it validates that your monitoring configuration works before you deploy it to production. If your ServiceMonitors, dashboards, and alert rules work on minikube, they will work on EKS or GKE.
There are multiple Prometheus-related Helm charts. Use the right one:
February 22, 2026
Setting up ArgoCD on minikube is not about automating deployments for a local cluster – you could just run kubectl apply. The point is to prove the deployment workflow before production. If your Git repo structure, Helm values, and sync policies work on minikube, they will work on EKS or GKE. If you skip this and bolt on GitOps later, you will spend days restructuring your repo and debugging sync failures under production pressure.
February 22, 2026
Every application fits one of four deployment patterns. Choosing the wrong one creates problems that are hard to fix later – a database deployed as a Deployment loses data on reschedule, a batch job deployed as a Deployment wastes resources running 24/7.
| Pattern | Kubernetes Resource | Use When |
|---|---|---|
| Stateless web app | Deployment + Service + Ingress | HTTP APIs, frontends, microservices |
| Stateful app | StatefulSet + Headless Service + PVC | Databases, caches with persistence, message brokers |
| Background worker | Deployment (no Service) | Queue consumers, event processors, stream readers |
| Batch processing | CronJob | Scheduled reports, data cleanup, periodic syncs |
A web API that can be scaled horizontally with no persistent state. Any pod can handle any request.
February 22, 2026
Minikube is excellent for learning and local development. But almost everything that “just works” on minikube requires explicit configuration on a cloud cluster. Here are the 10 things that change.
On minikube: You enable the NGINX ingress addon with minikube addons enable ingress. Traffic reaches your services through minikube tunnel or minikube service.
On cloud: The ingress controller must be deployed explicitly, and it provisions a real cloud load balancer. On AWS, the AWS Load Balancer Controller creates ALBs or NLBs from Ingress resources. On GKE, the built-in GCE ingress controller creates Google Cloud Load Balancers. You pay per load balancer.
February 22, 2026
Not every infrastructure change needs a full Kubernetes cluster to validate. Some changes can be verified with a linter in under a second. Others genuinely need a multi-node cluster with ingress, persistent volumes, and network policies. The cost of choosing wrong is real in both directions: too little validation lets broken configs reach production, while too much wastes minutes or hours on environments you did not need.
February 21, 2026
If you run Kubernetes on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) via minikube with the Docker driver, you will eventually try to run an amd64-only container image. For most software this works through QEMU emulation. For Go binaries, it crashes hard.
Go’s garbage collector uses a lock-free stack (lfstack) that packs pointers with counter bits in the high bits of a 64-bit integer. QEMU’s user-mode address translation changes the effective address space layout, which breaks this packing assumption. The result:
February 21, 2026
Setting up namespaces locally the same way you organize them in production builds muscle memory for real operations. When your local cluster mirrors production namespace structure, you catch RBAC misconfigurations, resource limit issues, and network policy gaps before they reach staging. It also means your Helm values files, Kustomize overlays, and deployment scripts work identically across environments.
The default minikube experience is everything deployed into default. This teaches bad habits. Developers forget -n flags, RBAC issues are never caught, resource contention is never simulated, and the first time anyone encounters namespace isolation is in production – where the consequences are real.
February 21, 2026
Minikube networking behaves differently from cloud Kubernetes in ways that cause confusion. LoadBalancer services do not get external IPs by default, the minikube IP may or may not be directly reachable from your host depending on the driver, and ingress requires specific addon setup. Understanding these differences prevents hours of debugging connection timeouts to services that are actually running fine.
Minikube creates a single node (a VM or container depending on the driver) with its own IP address. Pods inside the cluster get IPs from an internal CIDR. Services get ClusterIPs from another internal range. The bridge between your host machine and the cluster depends entirely on which driver you use.
February 21, 2026
Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster on your local machine. The difference between a minikube setup that feels like a toy and one that behaves like production comes down to three choices: the driver, the resource allocation, and the Kubernetes version. Get these wrong and you spend more time fighting the tool than using it.
On macOS with Homebrew:
brew install minikubeOn Linux via direct download: