[ztjio]

I switched my local "lab" setup from minikube (which was in use for a long time) to kind recently. The main reasons were

None of us run on Linux which means we're all using VMs for our containers and we all use Docker Desktop for various things. That meant we're running extra local VMs for no good reason. With kind I can just use the one vm for all the container things.

But the real reason for the actual switch was I just kept running into things that minikube couldn't do and Kind could, as well as having things I had decided to ignore like the fact that minikube does everything on one node which is 100% unnatural for kubernetes and I had multiple cases where this setup blinded me to problems that would occur in a real cluster.

3) I've also found I prefer the configuration/customization approach of kind over minikube though admittedly that's kind of a small thing.

Ultimately I find kind is a better simulator for the purpose of prototyping future cluster changes as well as use as a local "lab" for diagnosing services in a "production like" environment 100% under your control.