<p>While playing around with Docker and orchestration (kubernetes) I had to install and use minikube to create a simple sandbox environment. At the beginning I thought that minikube installs some kind of VM and run the &quot;minified&quot; kubernetes environment inside the same, however, after the installation listing my local Docker running containers I found minikube running as a container!! .. so here I'm a little bit lost and I have some questions hopefully somebody can clarify.</p>
<p>Does minikube itself works as a Docker container?</p>

<p>Just going off of the source code available on Github and my knowledge:</p>
<ol>
<li>No it's not run in a Docker container (although it does orchestrate launching containers)</li>
<li>It uses Go to launch a smaller footprint version of the Kubernetes API that is compatible with the Kubernetes standard APIs but not ideal for a full cluster</li>
<li>The hierarchy is Minkube Golang runtime -&gt; Docker containers running within mini cluster (where the cluster is an abstract concept which is just a bunch of namespaced Docker containers)</li>
<li>Running on Minikube is not ideal for production performance it is intended as a platform to test applications locally that will eventually run in fully-fledged Kubernetes clusters</li>
<li>The main architecture restrictions would be related to the differences between Minkube running locally and a full Kubernetes cluster running across different nodes so probably a lot of networking and authentication type differences/restrictions</li>
</ol>
