Starting Minikube

To complete our installation, we need to start Minikube. To do this, run the following command:

$ minikube start

On macOS, you should see something like this:

As you can see, the ISO used to create the virtual machine has been downloaded. The virtual machine starts,  the certificates that we will be using to authenticate against our one node cluster are generated, and then finally kubectl is configured with the details of our local Kubernetes cluster.

Running the same command on Windows 10 results in exactly the same set of steps:

Also, as you may have already guessed, running on Ubuntu 17.04 gives the same results. Run the following:

$ minikube status

You will receive a message confirming that everything is running and that kubectl has been correctly configured to communicate with your Kubernetes cluster:

If you were to open VirtualBox, you should see your Minikube virtual machine running; for example, this is what I see when opening VirtualBox on Windows 10:

Even though we have launched Minikube on three different operating systems, other than the initial installation, you can already experience what we discussed in Chapter 2, An Introduction to Kubernetes: there is no vendor lock-in and a consistent experience, and this is before we have started to use our newly installed Kubernetes cluster.