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Core Concepts

The objects you'll write YAML for every day. If Getting Started got you a running Deployment and a working kubectl, this section is where those objects stop being magic and start being things you can reason about and combine deliberately.

Read in this order

  1. Pods — the smallest deployable unit, multi-container patterns, init containers, and lifecycle phases
  2. ReplicaSets and Deployments — the reconciliation primitive underneath every Deployment, and basic rolling updates
  3. Services — stable network identity, and the four Service types at an intro level
  4. Namespaces — what's scoped by namespace, what isn't, and when to split by namespace vs. by cluster
  5. Labels, Selectors, and Annotations — the mechanism every Service, Deployment, and NetworkPolicy keys off of
  6. ConfigMaps and Secrets — the basics of injecting configuration and sensitive values into a Pod
  7. Volumes and Storage Basics — why Pods are ephemeral, and the two simplest volume types
  8. Jobs and CronJobs — run-to-completion and scheduled workloads, as opposed to long-running services

Depth lives elsewhere on purpose

This section deliberately stays at the "solid working knowledge" level. Deployment strategy tuning, kube-proxy internals, ConfigMap/Secret depth, and full storage architecture each get their own dedicated section later — every page here links forward to the right one.

Next

Once these are solid, continue to Workloads and Scheduling for deployment strategies, DaemonSets, StatefulSets, autoscaling, and scheduling controls.