Kubernetes in Practice: From Pods to Production

What's inside

1. Level 1: Why Kubernetes Exists and How a Cluster WorksFree
   Learn what problems Kubernetes solves beyond running single containers, and how the control plane (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager) works with nodes running the kubelet, kube-proxy and a container runtime to keep the desired state you declare.
2. Level 2: Your First Local Cluster: kind, minikube and kubectlFree
   Create a free local cluster with kind or minikube and learn the core kubectl workflow, including kubeconfig files, contexts and switching safely between clusters.
3. Level 3: Pods: The Smallest Deployable Unit
   Write your first Pod manifest by hand, apply it declaratively and understand the Pod lifecycle, restart policy and why bare Pods are rarely used in production.
4. Level 4: Labels, Selectors and ReplicaSets
   Use labels and selectors to group objects, and see how a ReplicaSet uses a selector to keep a set number of identical Pods running.
5. Level 5: Deployments, Rolling Updates and Rollbacks
   Manage ReplicaSets through apps/v1 Deployments, roll out new image versions without downtime, and roll back a bad release.
6. Level 6: Services: Stable Networking for Pods
   Give a changing set of Pods one stable address and DNS name with Services, and compare the ClusterIP, NodePort, LoadBalancer and headless Service types.
7. Level 7: Namespaces: Organising a Shared Cluster
   Split one cluster into logical areas with namespaces, and learn which resources are namespaced, how cross-namespace DNS works, and where namespaces stop isolating anything.
8. Level 8: ConfigMaps and Secrets
   Keep configuration and credentials out of container images by using ConfigMaps and Secrets as environment variables and mounted files, and learn honestly what Secrets do and do not protect.
9. Level 9: Resource Requests, Limits and QoS
   Tell the scheduler what each container needs and cap what it can use with CPU and memory requests and limits, and see how they set a Pod's quality-of-service class.
10. Level 10: Health Checks: Liveness, Readiness and Startup Probes
    Tell Kubernetes when a container is alive, ready for traffic and still starting by using HTTP, TCP, exec and gRPC probes, and avoid the classic probe mistakes that cause restart loops.
11. Level 11: Persistent Volumes and Claims
    Keep data beyond a Pod's lifetime with PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims and StorageClasses, using dynamic provisioning on a local cluster.
12. Level 12: Ingress and the Gateway API in Outline
    Route HTTP traffic from outside the cluster to Services using networking.k8s.io/v1 Ingress with a controller, and get an overview of the Gateway API as its modern successor.
13. Level 13: Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
    Scale a Deployment automatically with an autoscaling/v2 HorizontalPodAutoscaler driven by CPU utilisation from the metrics server, and understand what it needs in order to work well.
14. Level 14: Jobs and CronJobs
    Run tasks to completion with batch/v1 Jobs and on a schedule with CronJobs, controlling retries, parallelism, cleanup and overlapping runs.
15. Level 15: StatefulSets in Outline
    See how StatefulSets give Pods stable names, stable network identities and their own storage, and when to use one instead of a Deployment or a managed database.
16. Level 16: Packaging Apps with Helm Charts
    Install, configure, upgrade and roll back applications with Helm, and build a simple chart of your own from the manifests you have written.
17. Level 17: Debugging Failing Pods with Logs and Events
    Diagnose the most common Pod failures, including CrashLoopBackOff, ImagePullBackOff, Pending and failing probes, with a repeatable workflow built on describe, events, logs and ephemeral debug containers.
18. Level 18: RBAC and Service Accounts
    Control who and what can do which actions in the cluster with Roles, ClusterRoles, bindings and ServiceAccounts, following least privilege.
19. Level 19: Network Policies
    Restrict Pod-to-Pod and egress traffic with networking.k8s.io/v1 NetworkPolicies, starting from default-deny, on a cluster whose network plugin actually enforces them.
20. Level 20: Image and Pod Security Basics
    Reduce supply-chain and runtime risk with trusted, minimal, pinned and scanned images, non-root securityContext settings, and Pod Security Admission levels on namespaces.
21. Level 21: Managed Kubernetes: EKS, AKS and GKE Compared
    Learn which parts of a cluster Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE run for you (the control plane, upgrades, node pools and their hands-off modes: EKS Auto Mode, AKS Automatic and GKE Autopilot) and which parts are still your job, so you can carry what you built on kind or minikube over to a cloud cluster.
22. Level 22: Final Challenge: Ship a Production-Ready App Exam
    The capstone review of the whole course: work through a production checklist on your local cluster and deploy a multi-tier app the way you would ship it for real, using Deployments, Services, configuration, probes, resource limits, storage, Ingress, autoscaling, a CronJob, a Helm chart, RBAC, network policies and image security, then debug a Pod that has been deliberately broken. Note that this is practical grounding, not preparation for the hands-on CKA or CKAD exams.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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