Minikube runs in a virtual machine because its meant to be a cross platform development environment, and linux containers aren't natively supported on macOS or windows.
Minikube does have a --none driver, which run on bare metal and can be used to provision a cluster on virtualized hardware, such as a CI system or a GCE instance.
Why not minikube in production? Upgrades, downgrades, clean-up and maintenance. We don't offer any real guarantees on these lifecycle operations unlike a more robust setup like GKE.
Minikube does have a --none driver, which run on bare metal and can be used to provision a cluster on virtualized hardware, such as a CI system or a GCE instance.
Why not minikube in production? Upgrades, downgrades, clean-up and maintenance. We don't offer any real guarantees on these lifecycle operations unlike a more robust setup like GKE.
Disclaimer: I work on minikube