Establishing a Kubernetes environment

The samples rely on a functioning Kubernetes environment and kubectl to manage it.

Local environment

If you are new to Kubernetes, you'll likely want to start with a local environment, such as Docker Desktop, K3s, Minikube, OpenShift Local, or Rancher.

Isolated Kubernetes environments make it easy to install one or more apps, and delete all the state with a single gesture afterwords. For example, minikube makes that easy and offers a copy of kubectl so that you don't need to install it separately (however, it still uses the global kubectl configuration).

Switch between environments

kubectl can be used to switch between contexts to test differences in behavior between clusters. The most natural way of doing that is to maintain multiple kubectl contexts and switch between them.

$ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME             CLUSTER          AUTHINFO         NAMESPACE
*         docker-desktop   docker-desktop   docker-desktop   
          minikube         minikube         minikube         default
$ kubectl config use-context minikube
Switched to context "minikube".
$ kubectl config get-contexts        
CURRENT   NAME             CLUSTER          AUTHINFO         NAMESPACE
          docker-desktop   docker-desktop   docker-desktop   
*         minikube         minikube         minikube         default

This example shows switching between local clusters. The same technique can be used with cloud environments.

Register a cloud environment

kubectl can manage a Kubernetes cluster for a cloud service.

For Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can do that via the Azure CLI. This same command is available via the "Connect" menu in the Azure Portal (for an AKS resource).

Other cloud services have similar experiences.