Running MiniKube on an Azure VM

MiniKube is a Kubernetes distribution designed to make running a single node Kubernetes cluster easy for local development. However MiniKube relies on docker which relies on you having a Professional version of Windows on your laptop. If you don’t have that then it is really easy to stand up an Azure VM which can run MiniKube.

The first step is to log into the Azure portal and head over to Virtual Machines. You’re going to want a VM with a little bit of power too it so I recommend a D2s v3 or a D4s v3. That v3 part is important because you want a VM which can support nested virtualization.

Next pick an operating system. I like Ubuntu so I went with that.

kubectl

The first step is to install kubectl which can control your Kubernetes cluster. In an ssh session run

sudo snap install kubectl --classic

Now kubectl is installed.

MiniKube

Download MiniKube and chmod it so you can run it.

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64   && chmod +x minikube

Virtual Box

Now go ahead and install Virtual Box to be your virtual machine hypervisor. I know it suck that Oracle own it but hold your nose.

sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Starting up

Wit MiniKube in the current directory you can start it up with

./minikube start

It will churn for a little while during the first install as it downloads VM images and sets everything up.

Now you can run kubectl commands as if you were pointing at a huge K8S cluster.