I'm traveling with only one Fedora laptop and some external storage, but I'd like to build a simple Kubernetes or K3s environment for learning. My laptop has enough CPU cores and memory to run several workloads at once. Is it practical to create multiple virtual machines and use them as Kubernetes nodes, or is there a lighter and easier approach for simulating a multi-node cluster on a single machine?
3 Answers
For this use case, Kind is probably the easiest option. It runs Kubernetes nodes as containers, so you can create a multi-node cluster with much less overhead than running several full virtual machines. K3d is another good choice if you specifically want to practice with K3s.
You can run K3s, Minikube, or another lightweight distribution directly on Fedora as a single-node cluster. That’s usually enough for learning the basics, and avoiding multiple VMs will save your laptop’s resources. If your goal is to understand scheduling across nodes, then a container-based multi-node setup like Kind or K3d is a better compromise than several VMs.
Minikube is also beginner-friendly. Install kubectl first, then install Minikube and choose a supported driver such as VirtualBox when starting it. It will create a small Kubernetes node quickly, although it’s primarily intended for a single-node setup.
I was mainly hoping to imitate a real cluster environment with the hardware I have available, even if it’s only a rough approximation.