<p>I have a working production environment on a Ubuntu 18.04 machine with an application running with docker-compose (dedicated 8gb RAM and a Intel i7-4790). As an intermediate step for going cloud, I am migrating it to Kubernetes with Kompose. For the development environment, I am using minikube which is not intended for production.</p>

<p>From reading <a href="https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/out-of-the-clouds-onto-the-ground-how-to-make-kubernetes-production-grade-anywhere/1358" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Out of the Clouds onto the Ground: How to Make Kubernetes Production Grade Anywhere</a> I’ve seen some recommended standards for production-grade, but I can sacrifice some of the distributed advantages of Kubernetes in the beginning because this applications availability is not critical.</p>

<p>I would like to give a step ahead of using minikube in production, for further cloud deployment, but I only have this machine to start with. What would you recommend in my case?</p>

<p>If you consider to bootstrap Kubernetes cluster on bare metal platform, then I would take a look at <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/independent/create-cluster-kubeadm/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kubeadm</a>. It is most suitable for Kubernetes clusters with multi nodes support and provides a lot of features and customization options. </p>

<ul>
<li>Infrastructure provisioning - <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Cluster API</a></li>
<li>Third-party network <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/extend-kubernetes/compute-storage-net/network-plugins/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CNI</a> plugins support</li>
<li>Addons for monitoring, logging, and visualization.</li>
<li>Specific cloud provider integrations (Load balancers, Storage
classes, etc.)</li>
</ul>

<p>However, moving Kubernetes to cloud environment can bring a more efficient way for managing Kubernetes cluster. As most of cloud providers natively offer Kubernetes engine (<a href="https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GKE</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&amp;ai=DChcSEwjIrean2O_gAhUP2bIKHdAKB0sYABAAGgJscg&amp;sig=AOD64_2b-rE2OHlvduVomGwt6MWOnyCJtQ&amp;q=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjZ7eGn2O_gAhU0xMQBHT6lAPYQ0Qx6BAgGEAE&amp;adurl=" rel="nofollow noreferrer">EKS</a>, <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AKS</a>, etc.). </p>
