Day 1⌗

Focus: developers, administrators

Level: entry, intermediate

1. Containers and Kubernetes⌗

  • Containers vs VMs
  • Understanding Docker/Container DNA & its limitations
  • Immutability
  • Ephemeral identity/network identity
  • Singular execution unit - 1 process per container
  • Solving a modern web application concerns without an orchestrator
    • Networking
    • Loadbalancing - Exposing to the outside world
    • Storage & backups
    • Security:
      • Common-sense security concerns
      • Compliance security concerns
    • Configuration management
    • Change management - Rollout process
    • Logging, monitoring and observability
    • Long-term maintenance
  • The tipping point: understanding the threshold of complexity for introducing K8s
    • Technology implications:
      • Traditional cloud architecture vs the platform model.
      • Consistency vs glue.
      • The container orchestration landscape, circa 2023.
    • Social implications:
  • Implications on the existing in-house team
  • Implications on hiring

2. Docker images and containers⌗

  • Building images
  • Running containers
  • Mounting volumes & the storage layers
    • Understand process isolation
    • Exposing ports & the overlay “virtual” network

3. Orchestration & Control-Plane Basics⌗

  • The Kubernetes architecture
  • How would you architect a solution that solves the web application’s problems?
  • The 3 pillars of K8s design:
    • Namespaces & Isolation
    • The reconciliation loop pattern & controllers. Desired vs Current state.
    • Abstraction & interfaces are everywhere.
  • The anatomy of the control-plane
  • State: ETCD
  • CRUD API: API server
  • Scheduler
  • Reconciliation: Controller-manager
  • Other needed add-ons
    • Network & CNIs
    • Internal DNS
    • Kubelet service
    • Storage & CSIs
    • Cloud controller manager
  • Pods
    • Solving the limitations of the Container DNA
    • New design patterns emerge:
      • Sidecar
      • Init
      • Adapter
    • Pod DNA and co-located container attributes.
  • Wtf are all those legos?
    • Deployments & ReplicaSets: A good example of multi-layer abstraction to achieve change management good practices.
    • StatefulSets: Can I run my database as containers?
    • DaemonSets
    • Jobs, CronJobs
  • Networking
    • Services - Endpoints
    • Ingresses - Ingress classes
      • A gentle introduction to ingress controllers
    • Internal DNS
    • Exotic design examples with services
  • Understanding headless services
  • Storage
  • PVC, PV
    • Storage Classes
  • Configuration
    • ConfigMaps
    • Secrets
  • Setup a local k8s cluster
    • Local K8s flavours:
  • Kind
  • Minikube
  • K3s
  • Microk8s

4. Managing containers on Kubernetes⌗

  • kubectl
  • Deployments
  • Examples

5. Everything is Resources, except for resource definitions⌗

  • Anatomy of common resource building blocks
  • Metadata
  • Template

6. Scheduling⌗

  • How does the scheduler works
  • Filtering, annotations, labels, node labels & groups
  • Node selectors
  • Pod affinity/anti-affinity, Node affinity
  • Taints and tolerations

7. Application packaging and management⌗

  • Yaml
  • Helm
    • Anatomy of a chart
    • Release management
  • Kustomize

8. Deployment strategies⌗

  • Error budgets
  • Canary deployments and Blue/green deployments
  • Probes, health checking.
    • Liveness
    • Readiness
  • Zero downtime deployments
  • Rollbacks
  • Fail fast, hard, loud

9. Kubernetes Cluster options⌗

  • Tier 1: Managed K8s
    • Major cloud providers
    • DigitalOcean
    • Civo
  • Tier 2: Self-hosted management: enterprise providers
    • Rancher
    • Openshift
  • Tier 3: Self-hosted management: open-source providers
    • Gardener
    • Kops
    • Cluster API
  • Tier 4: Self-hosted low level administrations
  • kubeadm

Day 2⌗

Focus: power developers, administrators

Level: intermediate, advanced

1. Scalability design principles⌗

  • Scalability of Performance
  • Scalability of Availability
  • Scalability of Expenditure
  • Scalability of Maintenance
  • Single points of failure
  • Horizontal scalability
  • Caching, fresh data as needed
  • Asynchronous vs synchronous
  • Stateless workloads

Networking⌗

  • Understanding networking requirements
  • Routing traffic with kube-proxy
  • Service types
  • Service discovery
  • Service meshes
  • Ingress controllers
  • Gateways
  • External services & hybrid infrastructure possibilities

Storage⌗

  • VolumeSnapshot, VolumeSnapshotClaim

Access control⌗

  • RBAC

Extending the base API with CRDs⌗

  • Operators: Schema + Controller + Reconciliation
  • Abstracting away operational knowledge

The CNCF ecosystem⌗

  • What it is, how the graduation process works and how to navigate
  • Monitoring and observability
    1. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo
    2. Datadog, Elastic, other vendors
  • Backups
    1. Velero
    2. Vendor-specific solutions
  • Security
    • Vulnerability management
    • Trivy
  • Intrusion detection
    • Falco
  • Network security
    • Network Policies
    • Falco
    • Calico
  • Extending access control & authorization
    • Dex
  • Limiting attack surface
  • seccomp
  • Certificate management & rotation
    • Cert-manager

Capacity planning⌗

  • Horizontal scaling
  • Vertical scaling
  • Metrics-based scaling
  • LimitRanges
  • Serverless workloads
  • Functions-as-a-Service

Operators⌗

  • Anatomy of operators
  • Development options
    1. Kubebuilder
    2. Operator-framework
  • Maturity