Kubernetes: Easy App Dev Mac Environment

The most popular operating system for developers, according to the Stack Overflow developer survey, is Mac OS X. That means easy access to platforms, such as Kubernetes, on OS X is good for the platform to get easy exposure and good for developers to have easy access.

While installing Kubernetes with Vagrant or Docker is an option it would be nice to have a simple install that easily worked and brought in the community of useful tools, such as Helm.

That’s where the Kube-Solo and Kube-Cluster projects come in. One provides Kubernetes as a single VM and the other as a small cluster. It also provides a status bar menu with access to SSH into the VMs, get to the Web UI, and more. And, under the hood it uses the xhyve hypervisor which takes advantage of native OS X features so you don’t have to rely on outside systems like VirtualBox.

If you’re on Mac OS X and developing applications to use the Kubernetes API or run in Kubernetes this is something worth taking a look at.