How is minishift related to the Red Hat Container Development Kit?

[MJ]

Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK) version 3 is developed from an upstream project
called Minishift. The CDK contains a single binary called minishift. From this binary a virtual
machine disk image can be extracted. This disk image is built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
The minishift command is used to create a virtual machine that runs Docker and a local
OpenShift cluster. Developers can access the OpenShift cluster with the command-line interface
installed by the minishift command. Minishift supports the Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

[ricardo_jun]

An important fact about minishift is that you need to have an environment that supports Virtualization, tool included. 

For most developers, the easier virtualization tool to use is Virtual Box (www.virtualbox.org), but you may use KVM.

For additional information, https://www.okd.io/minishift/

[flozano]

The CDK and minishift does a little more than start a RHEL virtual machine to run Docker. It also inclides an extensible plug-in architecture to customize not just the VM but also the OpenShift cluster runing inside the VM, for example:

- Automatically set-up host folders for persistent volumes

- Install image streams for middleware images such as JBoss EAP, Red Hat Fuse, and Red Hat Decision Server

- Give the developer cluster administrator rights