Kubernetes on your macOS laptop with multipass, k3s, and Rancher 2.4 — Elasticsearch/Kibana in minutes!

This article shows how to set up a minimal k3s Kubernetes dev env on macOS Catalina using multipass, then installs Rancher and uses it to deploy Elasticsearch and Kibana workloads. The instructions adapt this article from the Rancher blog.

This is an update to https://medium.com/@jyeee/rancher-2-3-on-macos-with-minikube-and-helm-e83d26fb9552

Instructions for Windows 10: https://medium.com/@jyeee/rancher-2-4-14c31af12b7a

Thanks also to Scott Prive and Nick Stalter for catching some things I missed and updates!

After getting a little experience with Kubernetes, I can’t think of a better way to achieve the dream of “write once run everywhere” than an app containerized and deployed to k8s! On top of k8s, I’ve found Rancher to be the best interface for deploying apps and operating/maintaining the cluster.

I’m fortunate to work at a great company/customer that gives me access to amazing resources where I can run multiple clusters. For my home projects where I may not have those resources, I wanted to set up a lab on my laptop so I could practice.

Prerequisites

Only two prerequisites:

1. macOS Catalina (10.15) with 8 GB…