Welcome to the hands-on part of Kubernetes 101

How it works

The syllabus

• Containers — how an image is stacked in layers, and you build the tienda/api that gets deployed throughout the course.
• Fundamentals — your first Pod on the very first screen, your first broken Pod, and labels, selectors and annotations.
• Workloads — probes, requests, limits and QoS, Deployments with rollout and rollback, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, init containers and sidecars, Jobs and CronJobs.
• Scaling — Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and Vertical Pod Autoscaler.
• Networking — Services with internal DNS, Ingress with Traefik, Gateway API, NetworkPolicies and CoreDNS.
• Configuration — ConfigMaps and Secrets, the credentials for a private registry, and the Downward API.
• Storage — emptyDir, PersistentVolumeClaims and StorageClasses.
• Security — Namespaces, RBAC, ServiceAccounts and Pod Security Admission.
• Policies — ResourceQuotas and LimitRanges.
• Scheduling — affinities, taints and tolerations, priority and preemption, PodDisruptionBudgets and node draining, and devices with Dynamic Resource Allocation. Here you publish a device by hand and watch the selector discard it; the book doesn’t go that far.
• Working with the cluster — imperative debugging in mission format, the declarative flow with Kustomize, Helm, and the commands that aren’t in any manual.
• Extensibility — a CRD and an operator in Go with controller-runtime. Chapter 14 of the book gets you halfway; here you write the whole operator.
• Observability — the cluster’s Events, metrics with kubectl top, and a real stack with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and VictoriaMetrics.
• Inside the cluster — the Appendix D lab: a component-by-component tour of a real kubeadm cluster, not k3s.
• Final challenge — turn off the scheduler and diagnose the cluster with its heart laid open. Lab only: it has no chapter in the book.

And if you’re wondering what the book is for

The labs get you doing it. The book explains why it’s that way: where each decision comes from, what breaks silently when a field is missing, and what happens underneath when you type kubectl apply.

What doesn’t fit in a terminal: the 54 diagrams—the path of a request inside the kube-apiserver is not something you can see with kubectl—the appendix When each piece became available, which tells you in which version each thing arrived and what state it’s in, a kubectl cheat sheet sorted by what you want to do rather than alphabetically, a glossary of acronyms and an index to come back to.

What you need

An iximiuz Labs account and a browser. The cluster, kubectl and the code editor are already set up in every lesson. Start with the Fundamentals module. If you’d rather not depend on an external platform, the book’s repository brings up the whole tienda, the book’s sample system, on your machine with kind.

This book includes a hands-on part hosted on the iximiuz Labs platform (labs.iximiuz.com). The author is not involved in the platform or in running it. The sign-up link on this page is a referral link: if you sign up through it, the author may receive compensation from the platform. Nothing changes for you—the hands-on part is publicly and freely accessible, and requires no purchase.

It is offered as is, with no guarantee that it will keep working in the future. Changes introduced by Kubernetes or other tools may affect the scenarios. The author undertakes to do everything possible to keep them updated and current, but cannot guarantee their availability or that they will work permanently.

The platform’s operation, availability and data processing are the responsibility of iximiuz Labs, not of the author.