Part 2 of 7 — The Mac Kubernetes Lab: A Production-Mirror Setup from Scratch.
Previously in Part 1: I walked through why I replaced Multipass with OrbStack, the dual-cluster architecture I settled on, and a preview of the M1 vs M4 CNI problem that’s coming in Part 4.
The cluster I am going to set up in this article is the one I spend most of my working day inside. It’s a single-node Kubernetes cluster, always on, idles at around 512 MB of memory, has real LoadBalancer IPs and wildcard DNS out of the box. No MetalLB, /etc/hosts editing,kubectl port-forward muscle memory. By the time this article is done, it will also have Istio, Vault, and Crossplane running. Total elapsed time, the first time you do it: about ten minutes.
If you’ve ever built a local Kubernetes cluster and then spent the next twenty minutes wiring up MetalLB and editing /etc/hosts so you can actually reach a service from a browser, this is going to feel almost suspicious.
# 💻 Mac
