my local k8s cluster - wsl2, kind, traefik, gateway API and more...

as a proponent of developer productivity and velocity, i have been involved with plethora of experience building initiatives for microservices deployments on kubernetes. in my experience to make this possible i have played with many kubernetes setups over time starting with kubeadm , microk8s and k3s however these fell short for me overtime

although no one size fits all and things can be worked out in an opinionated way with specific approaches and solutions, i have always been on the lookout for what intrigues me to complete this experience with some aspects that i hold close to me as below

  • ✅ real fast to setup and destroy - under 5 min
  • ✅ declarative deployment experience
  • ✅ works on local WSL2
  • ✅ provides dashboards and other batteries accessible via ingress

with kind , i was able to build a simple, declarative local-stack completely running inside WSL2 and it has been the best one to date i have ever built

what’s available

screenshots

image-20260109094120747

image-20260109094845115

image-20260109093952350

image-20260109094003427

show me the code 🧑‍💻

checkout my repo here

value

✅ allows self-service k8s clusters locally

✅ simple,fast, declarative experience

✅ great for developer productivity/velocity

✅ enables similar experience as a cloud provider locally with all dashboards tracking metrics/logs etc

✅ easy ingress with Gateway API

✅ amazing setup for learning/experimenting with cloud-native world

tradeoffs

➖ need little beefy laptop with at least 32GB RAM

related posts