Course Overview

Designed for cluster administrators, this course covers essential Kubernetes setup and maintenance. It provides a solid foundation for the CKA exam while emphasizing real-world skills. Unlike many competitors, we focus on practical, project-based learning. Participants who complete the course will be well-prepared for both the exam and actual work environments.

Course Prerequisites

Students must be familiar with using kubernetes and should have an understanding of the basic kubernetes objects such as nodes, pods, deployments and services. We recommend students to follow our Core Kubernetes course before attending this course.

Outline

This course is engineered for cluster administrators, offering comprehensive training in installing, setting up, and configuring a Kubernetes cluster. While it serves as an excellent primer for the CKA exam, its true strength lies in preparing participants for real-world scenarios. Unlike many competitors, we prioritize hands-on, project-centric skills. Participants who actively complete the course will be well-prepared for the CKA exam and, more importantly, will have the specialized expertise to make a meaningful impact in real-world operations.

For those that are seeking certification, and wonder how this course maps to the CKA requirements:

Cluster Architecture, Installation & Configuration: this is the core of this course
Workloads & Scheduling: basics covered in Core Kubernetes, define namespace wide resource limit defaults and scheduling details (e.g., affinity, toleration's etc) are covered during this course.
Service & Networking: basics covered in Core Kubernetes while CNI and network policies are covered in this course
Storage: mostly covered in Core Kubernetes. During this course we explore on-prem storage solutions
troubleshooting: application troubleshooting is part of Core Kubernetes, during this course we cover general cluster and nodes related problems

During the workshop, students will set up and configure a 5-node kubernetes cluster with a HA control-plane.

Cluster Architecture

Recap of k8s architecture (Master and Worker Nodes)
Recap control plane components (APIServer, Controller-Manager, Scheduler and etcd)
Choosing a container runtime environment (docker, containerd, cri-o)
Discuss the role of Container Network Interface (CNI)
A deeper dive into the role of etcd
Planning a cluster (e.g, size, machine types, etc)

Installation

Discuss different installation techniques (kubeadm, kops, …)
Using kubeadm to install a cluster
Setup a control plane
Using your own image registry for the control-plane (and cluster)
Discuss Admission Plugins
Installing a CNI implementation
Set up an initial worker nodes
Adding masters to your cluster
Configuring kubeadm using YAML
Setup a HA etcd cluster
understand etcd
Introduce raft (consensus algorithm)
Topologies for Highly Available clusters (HA) (stacked vs external etcd nodes)

Configuring Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

recap RBAC
Planning user-access
User access workflows
Managing cluster administrators and users using RBAC
Limiting object and namespace access
Using OpenID (OIDC) to authenticate cluster users
Integrating with LDAP

Configuration

Configuring your k8s installation
Introduce etcd admin tools etcdctl and etcdutl
Backing-up your etcd configuration
Scaling worker nodes (adding/removing nodes)
Discuss Upgrading strategies
Upgrade a cluster to a new k8s version
General Configuration tuning Best Practices
Installation and configuration troubleshooting

Monitoring

Monitoring using Prometheus/Grafana

Using Prometheus
Installing and configuring Prometheus/Grafana (basics)
Discuss federation and scalability-
Understand prometheus Service Discovery
Using prometheus relabeling
Understand the structure of a metric
Understand the different metric types (counter, gauge, histogram, …)
Adding Service Monitors
Using Grafana dashboards
Importing existing dashboards

Log aggregation with Loki

introduce Loki
Understand the Architecture of Loki
Appreciate the indexing behaviour of Loki
Discuss the benefits of using Loki over other logging solutions
Discuss Loki configuration (promtail, storage, scraping, …)
Setting up Loki using helm

Storage

Recap volumes
Reiterate the different between static and dynamic storage provisioning
Setting up storage classes
Discuss on-prem dynamic storage solutions
Setting up a distributed storage solution (Rook/Ceph)
Monitoring storage

Workloads & Scheduling

Resources

recap of container resources (requests/limits)
setting up default resource limits per namespace
Define and manage resource sonatas
Monitoring workload resource

Pod Scheduling

Introduce the node selection process
Scheduling pods to nodes using node selectors
Keeping pods away from nodes using taints and tolerations
Inviting pods to nodes using affinity
Co-locating (or not) pods using podAffinity and podAntiAffinity

Networking

Recap networking objects (services, ingress, …)
Discuss kubeproxy
Using LoadBalancer service types for on-prem clusters

CoreDNS

overview of core-dns
recap of DNS records in kubernetes (A/AAAA/SRV/CNAME/…)
Understanding the default configuration
Configure upstream nameservers
Configure logging

Kube proxy

recap the role of kube-proxy
explore different modes (iptables, ipvs)
understand how kube-proxy uses iptables
discuss issues with using iptables
performance tuning for iptables mode
configure and explore IPVS
use different IPVS schedulers

MetalLB

Introduce MetalLB as a load-balancer for on-prem clusters
Understand the architecture of MetalLB
Pros and cons of Layer-2 vs BGP
Confusing IP pools for MetalLB
Using MetalLB CRDs

Technology stacks (Discussion)

Recap Cluster Observability and monitoring
Recap Cluster logging (ELK/Elastic Stack, Kibana, Loki, Grafana)
RecapResource and performance monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana)
Reiterate the importance of gitops
Discuss solutions for Secrets
Tools for Managing certificates
Using replication for namespace-bound objects
Other tools

Kubernetes Administration & Configuration

4 days