Question
How to run VVP on my Mac with Apple Silicon M1 Chip?
Answer
Note: This section applies to Ververica Platform (VVP) 2.8.1 (Flink 1.15.2) and later, was tested on a MacBook Pro laptop, but the answer below may be applicable to previous VVP versions and other Apple computers with M1 Chip too.
In general, there are no specific hardware requirements to run VVP either on Intel-based or Apple Silicon ARM-based CPU. As long as Kubernetes, Linux containers and JVM can run on your Mac, VVP should be fully functioning.
There are several options as of today which can be used to run VVP on MacOS with M1 Chip:
- Rancher Desktop (free)
- Colima (free)
- Docker Desktop (personal - free, company - license)
First two options are free open source software tools. Third option, Docker Desktop requires you to buy a license from Docker Inc. to use it for business, but in some cases it can be also used with free a license.
Open Source Tools
Rancher Desktop and Colima are both based on the Lima VM open source project and most probably will provide the same level of performance with regards to CPU and memory utilization. The main difference between them is that Rancher Desktop is a desktop application, like Docker Desktop application, while Colima is a CLI tool.
Once one of the preferred tool is installed, the main installation of VVP can be started.
Minikube
Since Minikube is a very popular tool to run single node Kubernetes locally, we should talk about it as well. As of writing this blog-post, Minikube does not have a stable driver for containers built for M1 Chip. Trying to start Minikube compatible drivers listed on this page https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/drivers/#macos will likely lead to startup or runtime errors in your container apps. We will update this blog-post once overall Minikube support for M1 Chip changes.