You should be able to get close to that with "real" Kubernetes, by only running etcd, kube-apiserver, and kube-controller-manager (without any kubelets, or kube

You should be able to get close to that with "real" Kubernetes, by only running etcd, kube-apiserver, and kube-controller-manager (without any kubelets, or kube-proxies), which should get you most of the way there (all Pods will just get stuck Pending, but most other stuff should work). Of course, that means that you're still running etcd and managing multiple servers, but at least you don't have to give it any global system access. If you're testing something that depends on pod lifecycles then you should be able to get most of the way by updating the status yourself from your tests. Fake logs may be a bit trickier, but I'd be fairly wary of anything trying to machine-parse logs anyway (unless you're testing a log aggregator, I suppose..).