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Comment by praveenhm | Hacker News Reader

I've been closely following the discussion on k3s and Kubernetes in general. I recently acquired an M1 Mac Ultra, and I'm curious about the best options available for running Kubernetes locally on it.

Does anyone have experience or recommendations in this area? I've heard about a few tools but wanted to gather insights from this knowledgeable community.

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You should try out OrbStack: https://docs.orbstack.dev/kubernetes/

I switched to it completely, it’s very convenient to have both fast (-est on Mac) Docker support and a really smooth VM setup for running occasional Linux tools (such as Yocto in my case).

Edit: added some background info to my recommendation.

Thanks for the orbstack recommendation, I am using it for docker containers, It is really fast and lightweight, I will try out Kubernetes.

If you're just messing around, just use kind (https://kind.sigs.k8s.io) or minikube if you want VMs (https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io). Both work on ARM-based platforms.

You can also use k3s; it's hella easy to get started with and it works great.

If you go the kind route, be sure to not use Docker for mac and instead opt for podman which is much more resource efficient. Now that I've switched over to podman, my computer doesn't sound like it's about to blast off when I'm running clusters.

Not a fan of docker for Mac for sure. Podman or Rancher Desktop or Colima are the way to go.

"colima" and it's underlying project "lima" are a pretty quick way to get started.

Extremely quick to stand up a single node cluster, or many types of VMs in lima.

https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

    limactl start template://k3s

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

    colima start --kubernetes

The tools are a bit rough around the edges if you try and do something outside of the happy path with them. Nothing bad as such, just the user experience isn't as seamless when say running the VMs on custom, addressable host networks or managing vms with launchd.

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