minikube sets up a host-only network, which makes it impossible to access the minikube VM from outside the VirtualBox host without tricks. When searching for
minikube external access, I stumbled on a
description how to tweak VirtualBox so that external access becomes possible. Caveat: I have not tried this, and the description is three years old.
Instead of minikube, consider using
kind (
Kubernetes
in Docker). It runs the Kubernetes services in Docker containers rather than a single virtual machine and is targeted to developers. Of course, you would have to set up Docker on your computer before using kind.
There might be other simple deployment tools for testing.
Regarding production installations, I would think that Kubernetes clusters are usually deployed in VMs on public clouds. The big players AWS, Azure and GCP all have convenient out-of-the-box K8s solutions, so that you don't have to worry much about complicated network setups. VMs running in the cloud are normally attached to some internal network but can be accessed from outside using SNAT (source network address translation).