Part 1 of 7 — "The Mac Kubernetes Lab: A Production-Mirror Setup from Scratch"

Series overview: This 7-part series walks through replacing Multipass with OrbStack on Apple Silicon and building a dual-cluster Kubernetes setup — a native daily driver cluster and a full VM-based EKS mirror with Vault PKI, Istio, and Crossplane.

The Problem With My Old Setup

My local Kubernetes setup was embarrassing. At Arkila Systems, I manage EKS clusters with Istio, HashiCorp Vault for secrets, and Crossplane for infrastructure provisioning. My laptop was supposed to reflect some version of that.…