Why the Docker Driver on ARM64#

When running Minikube on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4), the driver you choose determines whether your containers run natively or through emulation. The Docker driver runs containers directly on the host architecture — ARM64 — with zero emulation overhead.

This matters because QEMU user-mode emulation, which kicks in when you try to run amd64 images on ARM64, cannot reliably execute Go binaries. The specific failure is a crash in lfstack.push, deep in Go’s runtime memory management. This is not a fixable application bug — it is a fundamental incompatibility between QEMU’s user-mode emulation and Go’s lock-free stack implementation.

Secrets Management in Minikube: From Basic to Production Patterns#

Secrets in Kubernetes are simultaneously simple (just base64-encoded data in etcd) and complex (getting the workflow right for rotation, RBAC, and git-safe storage requires multiple tools). Setting up proper secrets management locally means you can validate the entire workflow – from creation through mounting through rotation – before touching production credentials.

Kubernetes Secret Types#

Kubernetes has several built-in secret types, each with its own structure and validation:

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.