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Course · 10 lessons

Kubernetes Administration Roadmap.

A Kubernetes course for day-2 operations: controllers, config and secrets, RBAC and observability, networking, autoscaling and Helm-managed rollouts, all 10 lessons.

Kubernetes only has one lesson track on this site (10 lessons) — this path and the Kubernetes Engineer path both draw on the same 10, sequenced differently. This one front-loads what you need to operate a cluster someone else built: how controllers keep workloads in their desired state, how configuration and secrets are managed, and what the running workloads actually look like — then moves into the day-2 toolkit of RBAC, observability, scaling, and safe rollouts/rollbacks. If your job is closer to building and shipping new workloads, the Engineer path sequences the same material for that.

Beginner — the cluster’s building blocks

  • Fundamentals: clusters, pods, deployments, services, namespaces, and how to reason about orchestration.
  • Pods and Workloads: containers, labels, selectors, and how Kubernetes schedules and manages workload lifecycles.

Intermediate — the operational surface

  • Workload Controllers: how Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, and Jobs maintain desired state through reconciliation — the mechanism behind everything you’ll operate.
  • ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Storage: separating configuration from images, and how volumes persist data.
  • Deployments and Rollouts: replica sets, rolling updates, rollbacks, and rollout strategies — what you’re managing day to day.
  • Services and Networking: stable virtual IPs, DNS, and service types.
  • Services, hands-on: ClusterIP, labels/selectors, Ingress, and service discovery via DNS.

Advanced — day-2 operations

  • Security, RBAC, and Observability: access control with RBAC, and monitoring cluster and workload health with logs, metrics, and events.
  • Horizontal Pod Autoscaling: a CPU-hungry container behind an HPA, watching replica count climb against real metrics-server numbers.
  • Helm: packaging a Deployment and Service as a chart, upgrading it with a real broken image tag, and rolling it back with helm rollback — the operational side of releases.

The roadmap, step by step

1
kubernetes Step 1 of 10

Kubernetes Fundamentals

Learn the core concepts of Kubernetes—clusters, pods, deployments, services, namespaces, and how to reason about orchestration.

2
kubernetes Step 2 of 10

Pods and Workloads

Understand pods, containers, labels, selectors, and how Kubernetes schedules and manages workload lifecycles.

3
kubernetes Step 3 of 10

Workload Controllers

Run Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs and CronJobs on a real cluster and watch each controller reconcile Pods toward the desired state.

4
kubernetes Step 4 of 10

ConfigMaps, Secrets, and Storage

Keep config out of images with ConfigMaps and Secrets, share files via emptyDir, and keep data through Pod deletion with a PVC, all run on minikube.

5
kubernetes Step 5 of 10

Deployments and Rollouts

Learn how Deployments manage replica sets, rolling updates, rollbacks, and rollout strategies in Kubernetes.

6
kubernetes Step 6 of 10

Services and Networking

Put a real backend behind ClusterIP, NodePort and LoadBalancer Services, then trace DNS across namespaces, EndpointSlices and headless Services.

7
kubernetes Step 7 of 10

Kubernetes Services — Hands-On

Run a Service on a real cluster: ClusterIP, DNS names across namespaces, NodePort, Ingress routing, port-forwarding, and debugging empty endpoints.

8
kubernetes Step 8 of 10

Security, RBAC, and Observability

Learn Kubernetes RBAC for access control and how to monitor cluster and workload health with logs, metrics, and events.

9
kubernetes Step 9 of 10

Horizontal Pod Autoscaling: Real Replicas, Real CPU Numbers

Deploy a CPU-hungry container behind an HPA and watch replica count climb in real time as metrics-server reports real utilization — no simulated numbers, just kubectl get hpa polled while it happens.

10
kubernetes Step 10 of 10

Helm: Packaging Manifests, and a Real Rollback

Every earlier lesson hand-applies individual YAML files. Package the same Deployment and Service as a Helm chart, upgrade it with a real broken image tag, and roll it back with helm rollback.