Nana Janashia · Mar 22, 2023

Kubectl | Minikube | Kops - What's the difference?

In the Kubernetes world, almost every tool has a “kube” in its name, plus there are so many of them, each having a different role, so it may get a little confusing. The difference between 3 of the widely used tools - Kubectl | Minikube | and Kops is actually pretty straightforward.

Kops It is used to create and manage a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on the cloud. It’s integrated with AWS and Google Cloud (GCE), and some other platforms. It’s a command line tool that offers simple commands to create, update and delete the cluster in a cloud environment.

These are some of Kops’s commands:

Kops commands

Kops commands

Minikube

It is used for the same purpose as Kops but for LOCAL k8s cluster creation. So with Minikube, you can create, update, and delete a cluster locally on your machine. It creates a single node cluster in VM on your local machine. It’s useful if you want to quickly create a small test cluster. It uses pretty simple commands to create and delete local clusters:

simple commands of Minikube

simple commands of Minikube

Kubectl

Once you create the cluster (either locally with Minikube or remotely in prod mode with kops), you need kubectl to actually configure it: create k8s components like pods and services, etc, troubleshoot the cluster, etc. Here are some common kubectl commands:

 kubectl commands

kubectl commands

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