Kubernetes¶

By Sameer Alam · Updated 20 October 2026

Kubernetes lets you describe the state your containerized workloads should be in — how many replicas, what image, what storage, what network access — and continuously reconciles the real cluster toward that state, forever, without you running a command every time something drifts. This is a hands-on guide to using it well: understanding the architecture underneath a kubectl apply, writing production-grade workloads, securing and observing a cluster, debugging what breaks, and operating OpenShift where that's the platform in front of you.

It's built to work two ways: read it start to finish as a course, or jump straight to the one page that answers what you need right now.

Start Here, Based on Where You Are¶

The Learning Path¶

flowchart TD
    A[Getting Started] --> B[Core Concepts]
    B --> C[Workloads & Scheduling /\nNetworking / Storage]
    C --> D[Configuration & Packaging /\nSecurity / Observability]
    D --> E[Cluster Administration /\nCI/CD & GitOps]
    E --> F[Production Engineering /\nOpenShift]
    F --> G[Labs & Case Studies]
    G --> H[Interview Preparation]

Learn by Building¶

Each project uses only what the previous ones already taught you. Skip ahead if you're already past a stage.

1. Deploy and expose your first app — Your First Deployment
2. Roll out a change with zero dropped requests — Deployment Strategies, Case Study: Rolling Deployment With Zero Downtime
3. Route real traffic in with TLS — Ingress and Ingress Controllers
4. Give a database stable storage — StatefulSets, StatefulSet Storage Patterns
5. Package it as a Helm chart — Helm Fundamentals and Writing Charts
6. Isolate a new team in its own namespace — Case Study: Multi-Tenant Namespace Setup
7. Lock down access with least privilege — RBAC
8. Scale it automatically under load — Autoscaling, Case Study: Autoscaling Under Load
9. Adopt GitOps instead of pushing kubectl apply by hand — GitOps With ArgoCD and Flux
10. Practice debugging a real incident — Case Study: Debugging a CrashLoopBackOff Incident
11. Run the production readiness checklist against it — Production Readiness Checklist
12. Learn from other people's outages — Kubernetes Outages: 11 Real Postmortems

Interactive Tools¶

Try your own numbers against the same rules the controllers use:

• Rolling update calculator — what maxSurge and maxUnavailable resolve to, step by step
• HPA replica calculator — desired replicas, the tolerance band, and scaling speed limits
• Forbidden error to RBAC — paste a Forbidden error and get the least-privilege Role, binding, and kubectl auth can-i check
• Resource quantity converter — see what 500m, 512Mi, or 1G really mean, and catch 512m of memory

What Changed Recently¶

Kubernetes moves fast, and a lot of tutorials online still teach patterns that no longer apply. The changes from the last few releases that most affect day-to-day work, and where each is covered:

Every Section¶

• Getting Started — history and origins, what Kubernetes actually is, control-plane architecture, installing kubectl, your first deployment
• Core Concepts — Pods, ReplicaSets and Deployments, Services, namespaces, labels and selectors, Jobs and CronJobs
• Workloads & Scheduling — deployment strategies, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, affinity and taints, requests/limits, autoscaling
• Networking — the cluster networking model, Services in depth, Ingress, NetworkPolicy, DNS, CNI plugins
• Storage — volumes, PersistentVolumes and Claims, StorageClasses and dynamic provisioning, StatefulSet storage
• Configuration & Packaging — ConfigMaps and Secrets in depth, config injection, Helm, Kustomize, external secret stores
• Security — authentication and authorization, RBAC, service accounts, Pod Security Admission, supply chain, encryption at rest
• Observability & Health — probes, logging architecture, metrics-server, events and debugging
• Cluster Administration — kubeadm, etcd, node management, upgrades, backup and restore, multi-tenancy
• CI/CD & GitOps — pipelines for Kubernetes, kubectl scripting, progressive delivery, ArgoCD and Flux
• Production Engineering — capacity planning, cost optimization, multi-cluster design, disaster recovery, readiness review
• OpenShift — what OpenShift adds, the oc CLI and Projects, Routes, Source-to-Image, Operators
• Labs — minikube, kind, Docker Desktop, Podman, and guided hands-on scenarios
• Case Studies — full worked deployments, including the failure paths
• Troubleshooting — a symptom-first debugging methodology, not just a list of errors
• Interview Preparation — by subject and by level, tied back to the concepts
• Quick Reference — cheat sheets, no prose

Related Learning¶

• Docker and Linux Containers — the runtime layer underneath every pod
• Ansible Automation — configuring the machines Kubernetes nodes run on
• Monitoring and SRE

Further Reading¶

• Kubernetes Documentation
• Kubernetes on GitHub
• CNCF
• Red Hat OpenShift Documentation