There are efforts underway to simplify cluster bring up, but this is not an easy problem because Kubernetes has to abstract away the underlying differences in O/S and cloud providers (example: load balancers on AWS vs. GCE).
I think they are getting there, but if you want dead simple "it just works", GKE is a great option.
I would love to see equivalent for Docker Toolkit, Docker for Mac, and Docker for Windows. It would make it easier to convince my team. I'll check out Minikube.
But yes, I know it is not an easy problem. I had looked at the automation involved as well as deployed Kubernetes by hand to AWS, having to translate what works on AWS.
And as I have mentioned in my comment, GKE is an option.
Having said that, on the desktop, I think all I really care about would be the equivalent of a docker-machine setup for Mac and Windows. Something that brings up a single-node CoreOS running stable, with networking working, and kubelet running via Docker. (Back in 2015, I had to rely on kubelet being baked into the CoreOS release). Probably not a big deal on Mac if I put a vagrant script, or use the existing ones that CoreOS has. But my teammates that are using Windows will want something that works well.
I'm curious -- what's the underlying distro being used for minikube?
Fair comment, and AFAIK, this is recognised and being addressed.
For example, minikube [https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube] to easily run Kubernetes on the desktop.
There are efforts underway to simplify cluster bring up, but this is not an easy problem because Kubernetes has to abstract away the underlying differences in O/S and cloud providers (example: load balancers on AWS vs. GCE).
I think they are getting there, but if you want dead simple "it just works", GKE is a great option.