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:
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:
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:
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