Difference between Minikube, Kubernetes, Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, etc

Presuming that your goal here is to run a set of containers over a number of different Raspberry Pi based nodes:

• Minikube isn't really appropriate. This starts a single virtual machine on a Windows, MacOS or Linux and installs a Kubernetes cluster into it. It's generally used by developers to quickly start-up a cluster on their laptops or desktops for development and testing purposes.

• Docker Compose is a system for managing sets of related containers. So for example if you had a web server and database that you wanted to manage together you could put them in a single Docker Compose file.

• Docker Swarm is a system for managing sets of containers across multiple hosts. It's essentially an alternative to Kubernetes. It has fewer features than Kubernetes, but it is much simpler to set up.

If you want a really simple multi-node Container cluster, I'd say that Docker swarm is a reasonable choice. If you explicitly want to experiment with Kubernetes, I'd say that kubeadm is a good option here. Kubernetes in general has higher resource requirements than Docker Swarm, so it could be somewhat less suited to it, although I know people have successfully run Kubernetes clusters on Raspberry Pis.

Docker ComposeA utility to to start multiple docker containers on a single host using a single docker-compose up. This makes it easier to start multiple containers at once, rather than having do mutliple docker run commands.

Docker swarmA native container orchestrator for Docker. Docker swarm allows you to create a cluster of docker containers running on multiple machines. It provides features such as replication, scaling, self-healing i.e. starting a new container when one dies ...

KubernetesAlso a container orchestrator. Kubernetes and Docker swarm can be considered as alternatives to one another. They both try to handle managing containers starting in a cluster

MinikubeCreating a real kubernetes cluster requires having multiple machines either on premise or on a cloud platform. This is not always convenient if someone is just new to Kubernetes and trying to learn by playing around with Kubernetes. To solve that minikube allows you to start a very basic Kubernetes cluster that consists of a single VM on you machine, which you can use to play around with Kubernetes.

Minikube is not for a production or multi-node cluster. There are many tools that can be used to create a multi-node Kubernetes cluster such as kubeadm

I get the impression you're mostly looking for confirmation and am happy to help with that if I can.

1. Yes, minikube is local-only
2. Yes, minikube is intended to be single-node
3. Docker-compose isn't really an orchestration system like swarm and Kubernetes are. It helps with running related containers on a single host, but it is not used for multi-host.
4. Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are both container orchestration systems. These systems are good at managing scaling up, but they have an overhead associated with them so they're better suited to multi-node.
5. I don't know the range of orchestration options for Raspberry Pi, but there are Kubernetes examples out there such as Build Your Own Cloud with Kubernetes and Some Raspberry Pi.