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

In Kubernetes world almost every tool has a “kube” in its name, plus there are so any 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 | Kops is actually pretty straightforward.

Kops
Is used to create and manage a production-grade Kubernetes cluster on 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 on cloud environment. These are some of Kops commands:

kops create cluster --name mycluster.k8s.local
kops update cluster mycluster.k8s.local
kops delete cluster mycluster.k8s.local

Minikube
Is used for the same purpose as Kops, but for LOCAL k8s cluster creation. So with Minikube you can create, update, 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 cluster:

minikube start
minikube stop

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 create -f deployment.yml
kubectl get pods
kubectl describe pod pod-name

You can find a diagram comparing the 3 tools here:
Diagram - scroll to the end of the article

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