Hello and welcome to the Certified Kubernetes Administrators course.
My name is Mumshad Mannambeth and I will be your instructor for this course.
So about me, I am a Solutions Architect specializing on Cloud, Automation and DevOps Technologies.
I have authored several Best Seller and Top Rated courses on technologies like Docker,
Kubernetes and OpenShift as well as automation technologies like Ansible, Chef and Puppet.
This course is the third installment in the series on Kubernetes and focuses on the Administrator Certification.
Let's take a look at the structure of this course.
We start with a series of lectures on various topics in Kubernetes, where we simplify complex concepts
using illustration and animation and some fun analogies.
We have optional quizzes that test your knowledge after each lecture.
We have hundreds of practice questions that will help you practice what you learned on a real live environment
right in your browser.
Yes you don't need to have your own environment.
We give you the required labs that are real and that can be accessed by you anywhere, anytime,
And as many times as you want. The kubernetes certification is hands-on,
So the practice test will give you enough experience and practice on getting ready for it.
More on this coming soon.
We also have a dedicated slack channel that you get exclusive access to where experts and other students
gather to help you clear your doubts and get instant support on your queries.
We will also discuss some tips and tricks throughout this course to help you crack the certification
exam.
And as always if you have any questions, you may reach out directly to us through our Q&A section or
slack channel. Now, this is one of the course in the series on Kubernetes and focuses on getting
the Kubernetes Administrators Certification. So having a basic understanding to some of the concepts
and pre-requisites will help. Knowing basics of Docker, and some basics of kubernetes itself, such as
pods, deployments and service and having a good understanding of the YAML language, setting up a basic
lab environment using virtual box can all help in this journey.
We do discuss setting up a kubernetes cluster in detail in this course and we also have online labs
and practice tests for a lot of these concepts,
but if you are an absolute beginner I highly recommend taking the Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners
course first which is a short quick introduction to some of the basic concepts.
Let us now look at the Course Objectives. The objectives of this course are aligned to match the Certified Kubernetes
administrators exam curriculum.
We will discuss about details around the certification itself in one of the upcoming lectures before
heading into any of these topics.
However remember this is not just a course to clear the certification.
We discussed a number of other related topics and the intent of this course is to get you to be good
at installing configuring and troubleshooting kubernetes cluster. With the way the contents are organized
In this course we do not start the course by building a cluster from scratch.
We actually do it towards the end of the course in the Installation, Configuration and Validation
section.
You will be working on pre-built live clusters throughout the earlier sections in this course.
And I think that makes sense.
Think of this as learning to engineer and build a car.
It would be much easier, if you have already driven a car, know how it works. If you know what the wheels are for, what
the transmission is for, what the brakes are for and how to fill fuel etc.
That way you would be able to relate those to the underlying concepts better when you learn them and
that is why I think practicing on prebuilt clusters and learning the basic concepts first will help
you understand how to build a cluster from scratch towards the end of this course.
We start with the core concepts, where we look at the various components that form the Kubernetes architecture.
We then discuss some of the API primitives. Here
we mostly recap what we learned in the beginners course about PODs, ReplicaSets, Deployments, Namespaces
etc..
We then look at services and other network primitives. In the next section.
We look at scheduling.
We start with Labels & Selectors, followed by daemon sets and how resource limits can affect pod placements.
We look at ways of manually scheduling a pod and configuring multiple schedulers and how to view the
scheduler events. In the logging and monitoring section
we look at different ways of monitoring and logging the cluster of components as well as applications
hosted on the cluster. In the Application Lifecycle Management section,
We look at rolling updates and rollbacks and various ways of configuring applications, scaling applications
and primitives necessary to create a self-healing application. In the cluster maintenance section,
We look at the different options available to take down a node in the cluster for maintenance purposes.
We then look at how software releases are organized in Kubernetes, followed by the cluster upgrade
process.
You will perform an upgrade to a live cluster yourself in the practice test without taking down the
application.
And finally we look at the different backup and restore methodologies.
We then move to security.
We start by looking at different ways of authenticating into the that as cluster.
We take a good look at TLS certificates.
We start all the way from the absolute basics of TLS certificates into how exactly a cluster can
be secured with these.
So there are many practice exercises around that. You will be asked to troubleshoot and fix issues related
to certificates which I believe will give you confidence in working with certificates.
We look at the new certificates API.
We then look at role based access controls and attribute based access controls for authorization.
We then look at network policies and security contacts in the networking section.
We start with some optional networking prerequisite lectures.
These will help you understand and troubleshoot networking in kubernetes is in-depth.
So we start by understanding the basics of networking in Linux, basics of switching and routing and bridge
networks in the Linux system.
We try and understand the basics of DNS.
What core DNS is. We then look at network name spaces and then relate those concepts to networking
in Docker. We then start with networking in a kubernetes cluster,
We look at CNI and what they are.
We look at one of the CNI networks in depth and how it functions.
We look at how service networking works under the hood. We then look at DNS and kubernetes cluster.
And finally ingress networking.
And of course this section is filled with practice exercises where you will practice viewing and gathering
network information from a cluster, implementing network configurations and, troubleshooting network
related issues in a cluster.
We then look look at designing, installing, configuring and validating a kubernetes cluster from scratch.
We understand how a High Availability cluster works, how an ETCD cluster works and the best practices
in deploying an HA cluster.
We look at two ways of bootstrapping the worker Node one the usual way and the other using the TLS
bootstrap approach.
We finally perform end-to-end tests on the cluster we deployed using the kubernetes testing infrastructure.
With all of this
you should have gained enough knowledge on how the various components work together in a kubernetes
cluster.
So troubleshooting piece should come to you naturally.
We look at some techniques that can be followed while troubleshooting a cluster and applications running on them
Again we have a number of practice tests where we give you a broken cluster and you troubleshoot and fix them
Well that's a lot and we plan to add more relevant topics to this list going forward.
Finally a word about practice tests. The kubernetes certification exam is a practical hands on exam
so it is very important to practice what you learn which is why we have got a custom solution that will
give you access to a real Kubernete environment right in your browser along with a quiz portal that
provides fun and challenging problems for you to solve. You're required to gain a set of different skills
working with kubernetes, such as how to look for information, how to troubleshoot issues.
That is why we have questions where you will be asked to find information within an environment.
You will also be asked to perform configuration tasks where you will be required to configure and deploy
applications and services on the cluster.
We will test your work and provide feedback instantly.
We will occasionally make changes to the environment or break stuff and ask you to troubleshoot and
fix them.
These are common issues that one would face while working with kubernetes and these exercises will
help you troubleshoot and fix issues quickly.
When you see an error message you should be able to understand what that means and where to look for
information related to that error message and how to fix it.
One of the major challenges in a practical test like the one in the kubernetes certification is time
even simple issues like a typo or an indentation error in a YAML file can take a beginner hours to fix
This is why we have hundreds of such exercises in this course that will make you an expert and give
you enough practice to help you clear the exam.
Well, that's all for now,
Thank you for enrolling and I'll see you in class.